Vista Followup Already in the Works

DesertBlade passed us an InfoWorld article, which has the news that Microsoft is already hard at work on the next version of Windows ... and we may see it as early as 2009. Possibly codenamed Vienna, the next Windows iteration will be coming a brief two and a half years after Vista's launch. This is the same timeframe Microsoft claims it would have utilized for Vista, had they not put Longhorn 'on the back burner' to deal with security issues in XP. Corporate Vice President of Development Ben Fathi is already discussing features for the next OS: "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Comments

Fundamentals.

[JonathanR]

We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology
The power switch?

Re:Fundamentals.

[jackharrer]

More important one: RESET!

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they mean new software features.

For instance a completely new file system.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Something that sells.

The store I work in is a fairly large one, and has only one competitor within the town and its outlying neighbours. Since Vista launched on the 30th, we've sold all of two copies. A lot of the people that are coming in to look at new PC's or Laptops are deliberately avoiding the ones pre-loaded with vista because of all the horror stories they've heard, and of the two copies of Vista that we've sold, one has come back as unusable (it was the upgrade version of home premium. The owners laptop was running XP Pro. The Home premium upgrade refuses to install over an XP pro installation, and the user doesn't want to upgrade to the business version, and ultimate was delayed, therefore not an immediate option. Why the hell are microsoft turning away sales like that?), and the other user is considering returning it as he can't even get on the net with it, despite have drivers for all of his hardware.

As far as launches go, this one has been pretty pathetic. So far, it seems to have cost us more than it's actually earned.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

That would be nice... One that doesn't require manual defragmenting the hard drive (everybody else can do it...) But they've been working on a new file system for a few years now and keep pushing it back, so it's kind of going the way of Duke Nukem' Forever...

The new interface/interaction paradigm might be cool, but that should come out of Microsoft Research so they can do proper user experience testing (and not just test like 13 MS employees like they did with the ribbon (this was mentioned on the Office development blog)... The ribbon looks cool, but I find myself digging around for items that I used to just have a small toolbox pop up for or were just on the main toolbar--plus there doesn't appear to be a way to reorganize the ribbon...) The regular MS people just don't have the training/expertise to do much user experience work--I've talked to employees about it at career fairs and such (I'm an HCI major) and most of them don't even know what user experience/usability work really is... And for a company that large and ubiquitous, that's just sad...

Re:Fundamentals.

[jacksonj04]

Vista *does* defrag automatically when idle, over-fragmented, 3am(ish) or when it's feeling like it. That said, a slightly more useful filesystem (is WinFS still due with Vista SP1 later this year?) would be lovely.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

So WinFS is finally being released? That was the one I was referring to that's been in development (and delayed) for years now. I've heard mixed thoughts about whether or not it will be better or worse, but we won't know until it's out...

The other thing that might be useful (eventually) is a file system designed to optimize the use of flash drives (not really all that useful with 30 GB flash drives costing a few hundred, but this will likely be very useful in about 2-5 years after the prices have dropped considerably/larger capacity flash drives are available).

Re:Fundamentals.

[ocbwilg]

The new interface/interaction paradigm might be cool, but that should come out of Microsoft Research so they can do proper user experience testing (and not just test like 13 MS employees like they did with the ribbon (this was mentioned on the Office development blog)... The ribbon looks cool, but I find myself digging around for items that I used to just have a small toolbox pop up for or were just on the main toolbar--plus there doesn't appear to be a way to reorganize the ribbon...)

It was more than just 13 people at Microsoft. It was based on feedback from a lot of customers as well, not to mention multiple rounds of testing. The philosophy behind it was to make the menus more context sensitive, to reduce the number of clicks necessary to get something done. I've been at some demos where they discussed the number of clicks it takes to complete various tasks in Office 2003 versus Office 2007, and in many cases they've seen a 50-60% reduction in clicks (for example, the number of clicks it takes to insert a picture into a Word document). I agree that the ribbon takes some getting used to, but after using it for a few months I find that it is actually much easier and faster to use than navigating the old menus. The biggest problem is the learning curve for people who were used to the old way of doing things.

A well-cited example from the usability tests that they did while Office 2007 was in development: The testing team brought in two groups of people, one a group who had little to no MS-Office skills, and the other a group who used Office extensively. They sat them both down in front of PCs with Office 2003 loaded and assigned them a list of tasks to complete within a specified timeframe. Most of the "Office Experts" completed all of the tasks, and none of the "Office Newbies" completed all of the tasks. Then they sat them down in front of PCs with Office 2007 loaded and the same list of tasks. In this case, most of the "experts" completed most of the tasks, though it took them a little longer to do it. But most of the "newbies" also completed most of the tasks as well. This relatively simple test underlines to me just how much of an improvement the ribbon interface is (not to mention my personal experiences with it). If you take the time to use it you will undoubtedly find it faster over time.

Of course, the kicker to the experiment that MS did was that they offered the participants a free copy of MS Office for doing the test. They could have their choice of a full version of Office 2003, or a beta copy of Office 2007 and a free copy of the gold version when it was released. Most of the "experts" took 2003, while the "newbies" took 2007. Just goes to show you how entrenched some people get.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

I do like the ribbon interface to a degree, I just think it should have gone through MS Research where they could have done more extensive testing and perhaps delayed the ribbon until the next version--right now you not only have the learning curve for the ribbons but the inconsistency of interface throughout the Office suite (Publisher and Visio use the old interface) plus the fact that XP and Vista are both entrenched in the old interface. If you're going to push a new paradigm then you should do so consistently... Plus, most Office users are the already entrenched users...

Re:Fundamentals.

[suv4x4]

The ribbon looks cool, but I find myself digging around for items that I used to just have a small toolbox pop up for or were just on the main toolbar--plus there doesn't appear to be a way to reorganize the ribbon...)

I upgraded to Office 2007. It was confusing. For a minute. I have to say I'm really impressed with the new interface, and most of the reviews out there are positive, regarding the ribbon.

Of course, you'll always find the occasional "usability expert" nagging how it's not usable because HE thought so, but interfaces are not made with usability experts in mind, but users. If there's lack of coherence between those two groups, I'd opt to trust the overall user experience instead.

And while talking about usability, start with your blog:

- some of the tags are too tiny to even read (why not make them bigger or just hide them?)
- the search box on top is just a blank text field without any hint as to what it is, or a button to hit (not everybody expects Enter would work). It doesn't work without JavaScript too, without any logical reason.
- you fixed the text size, so it can't scale in IE (my, my)
- your header "Shiny Happy People - the user experience" fails the "can I figure what this site is about in 10 seconds" rule
and so on and so on.

Re:Fundamentals.

[drsmithy]

That said, a slightly more useful filesystem (is WinFS still due with Vista SP1 later this year?) would be lovely.

FFS. How many times has this been said ?

WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database.

Re:Fundamentals.

[jfengel]

Most of the "experts" took 2003, while the "newbies" took 2007.

That's interesting. As a designer, you hate to sacrifice long-term usability for ease of learning. Clippy was annoying served as a way to get to expert level (as long as you could shut him off when you got there.) You're supposed to spend a lot more time interacting as an expert (years) than as a novice (hopefully days or weeks at most), but everybody's first impression is as a novice.

I've known some UI designers to insist that there doesn't have to be a difference between expert interaction and novice interaction, but I have a hard time believing that.

I haven't had a chance to play with the ribbons yet. I'm disappointed to hear that the experts preferred 2003, and that it took them less time to use it.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

It's not my blog, it's my professor's blog--I'm just in the class and post on it... I agree with your criticism of it though. And I didn't say the Ribbon was bad, just that I found myself digging more than I used to (which is the opposite of their stated goal). I think it has a tremendous amount of potential, it just needs some more work and needs to be integrated throughout the Office suite and Windows otherwise it forces user's to constantly change their mindset for completing tasks. Customization would be good as well.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a solid state drive and then you dont have to defragment :) Problem solved.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Stevecrox]

Ribbons are great, I was an intermediate user of Office 2003 but even tho I still only consider myself an intermediate user on office 2007. The difference is I feel more powerful and things to me seem much quicker, one thing I began to use heavily in the Office 2007 beta was the comments tool (very valuable for uni work) for the moment I've downgraded to Office 2003 and the fact I have to keep clicking a menu has put me off using it, pretty much every function has become like that since discovering Ribbons. Their horrible at first but after a week something clicked for me.

Oh and not to sound like a Microsoft Loving shill I've started using OpenOffice on my laptop, its actually working out great for that purpose, my laptop needs to open powerpoint slides and allow me to make word documents which include tables, pictures and a few easy to see formating options. OpenOffice does that well, its just when I get home I find the evil Office that much better in actually combining all the notes from the day into a usable, indexable and helpfull to revise from format. Stealing ribbons would be a very good idea for OpenOffice I think, although I'm sure a ton of people would argue that I'm wrong

Re:Fundamentals.

[maxwell demon]

and most of the reviews out there are positive, regarding the ribbon.

I guess if the ribbon had been introduced in some OSS program instead, there would be loud complaints from all sides how the author could only be so stupid to break with the long-known standard, and would stress the importance of consistency, which obviously and blatantly is violated by those new ribbons ...

Re:Fundamentals.

[Short Circuit]

Those stopped being common since the ATX standard came into play. Sometimes you see them as a feature of the power supply, mounted on the back, but most computers I've dealt with don't even have that.

(No, a software-controlled power switch doesn't count. Even if holding the button in for four seconds is supposed to turn the computer off.)

Re:Fundamentals.

[ElephanTS]

FFS. How many times has this been said ?

WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database.

What about FFS? Maybe it's the new file system MS are working on?

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

honestly this sounds like FUD. I work in a fairly large store also, Vista Ultimate sold out within a few days. There is plenty of home versions on the shelf but ultimate is selling like hotcakes.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS. How many times has this been said?

Does FFS means "for fuck's sake"?

Re:Fundamentals.

[drsmithy]

Does FFS means "for fuck's sake"?

Yes.

Welcome to the Intarwebz, enjoy your stay. Bathroom is the third door down on the left.

Re:Fundamentals.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Since Vista launched on the 30th, we've sold all of two copies

Really? You mean that you checked the inventory levels in the computer, and noticed you only sold two copies? Or, do you mean, "I only noticed two copies being sold". Because, if your store is as big as you claim, you probably don't have access to detailed sales records (unless "work in" means "manage"), and you're certainly not going to be there to see all of the potential sales.

No one expected Vista to fly off the shelves. Most people don't buy new copies of Windows on their own - they get them with a new PC. The only version of Windows that sold upgrades in substantial numbers was Windows 95, and there is no product that Microsoft could put out that would match the upgrade from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95.

As far as launches go, this one has been pretty pathetic.

Really? Because, your rant notwithstanding, the numbers tell otherwise.

PC sales for the week of Vista's release are up 173% compared to the week previous, and up 67% versus the same week in 2006.

A lot of the people that are coming in to look at new PC's or Laptops are deliberately avoiding the ones pre-loaded with vista because of all the horror stories they've heard

A lot of this is because of the massive FUD campaign against Vista that seems to be prevelent in the media. It is too early for most users to upgrade, but Vista isn't going to destroy the internet or eat your children. It's a solid, stable OS.

Hasn't anyone noticed that people said the EXACT SAME THINGS about Windows XP? Antivirus and CD burning programs were incompatible. Hardware support was sketchy. Games didn't run as fast. Everyone was going to stick with Windows 98, because it was "good enough".

There were complaints about how much XP Pro cost ($299/$199 upgrade). Five years later, and the "business" version of Vista is still $299/$199 - effectively, it's actually cheaper than XP professional was at launch. And you can still buy Vista as an OEM product, just like XP. Media Center Edition was ~$110 OEM, Vista Home Premium is ~$115. XP Home was ~$90 OEM, so is Vista Home Basic, which - unlike XP Home - doesn't have crippled filesharing or user options.

The Home premium upgrade refuses to install over an XP pro installation

Yes, just like XP Home refuses to upgrade over Windows 2000. This is neither new nor unexpected, although, unlike with XP, there is a workaround with Vista.

and of the two copies of Vista that we've sold, one has come back as unusable

Apparently, my previous assertion that you don't work at a large store is true - none of the major stores allow customers to return opened software.

and the other user is considering returning it as he can't even get on the net with it

At this point, I think you are just making shit up. Because, of course, at a major computer retailer, you not only know everybody who purchased and returned a specific product, you know the customers who have purchased and thought about returning the product, too! Apparently, your "farily large" store also provides free after-sale support! That sounds like the hallmark of a small business, not something like a Best Buy.

Crap on Vista all you want. You have a choice - buy a Mac or use Linux. Many people will probably do just that. But Vista supports my hardware just fine - ALL of it, and, with two exceptions (UltraVNC and PDFCreator), it supports all of my software too. It's running on my notebook and my desktop right now - I'm typing this comment in Vista. It's Windows, people, with everything that being Windows entails. If you liked XP, you'll probably like Vista. If you hate Windows, buy a Mac or use Linux - Vista isn't going to change anything.

Re:Fundamentals.

[dlim]

When I went out to purchase my copy of Ultimate, the first store I went to, Circuit City, was sold out. With all the negative publicity and mixed reviews, I was a surprised. I guess I spend too much time on Slashdot.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Old Man Kensey]

FFS. How many times has this been said?

If your product is one thing, don't name it something else.

You can bollock on about WinFS being "a database, not a filesystem" all you want, but the simple fact is it was advertised as a replacement for NTFS, it's called WinFS (not WinDB), it's conceptually a successor to the Object File System and it does the things a filesystem does (i.e. store files on some kind of medium in some fashion). So while it may be a database, it is in fact a filesystem as well. Microsoft can say the FS stands for "Future Storage", just like ISO, AT&T and FedEx can say "our names don't stand for anything", but no one is fooled.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Dan_Bercell]

It takes roughly a week for a user to get acustom to using the ribbon interface, after that they don't want to go back to the usual menu. Like you said you are digging for items, but once you find them its easy to find them again. Its an entirely new interface, of course its hard to find some items you once loved to use.

Once the employees learned to use it, the new interface is a very good thing.

Re:Fundamentals.

[symbolic]

As for being "pathetic" I guess it depends on which side of the fence you're on. As an avid OSS supporter, I think it's quite successful. Your experience means that people are delaying the adoption of a DRM component masquerading as an operating system, among other things. At least it will give people the opportunity to look beyond the box to see that Linux and Macintosh are two alternatives.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mackyrae]

But if you use Linux, you're still paying for Vista :(

I had Vista RC on my laptop for a few days, and I couldn't get any internet with it. Wireless worked as long as there wasn't any encryption or a VPN. Wired didn't work at all. I couldn't stand it after 4 days and put Linux back on. Vista's not much of an improvement over XP. Instead of blue, it's black. Woohoo. And since being an improvement over XP's security isn't hard (every other OS is already), that's not impressive either.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database.

Right. It's WinDB that's the new filesystem.

Re:Fundamentals.

[MojoStan]

So WinFS is finally being released? That was the one I was referring to that's been in development (and delayed) for years now. I've heard mixed thoughts about whether or not it will be better or worse, but we won't know until it's out... It will probably be an add-on to Vista, not part of Vista's successor (Vienna). Recent articles (past 2 months) about Vista's successors have hinted that WinFS is likely to be part of an add-on/service pack/roll-up to Vista codenamed "Fiji" (also called "Vista RC2" by some people). Fiji is due some time in 2008 and supposedly includes the vaporous WinFS, updated Aero, updated .NET Framework, updated bundled apps, HD-DVD playback (with decoder), and other "minor" updates/add-ons.

• Looking at Fiji and Vienna
• Looking Beyond Vista To Fiji and Vienna

Re:Fundamentals.

[BronsCon]

Funny that was; had I any mod points, well... it's already +5 so I wouldn't waste them.

I was thinking more along the lines of:

Vienna... Sausage?

Gee, Bill, that's a huge OS. Compensating for something?

Re:Fundamentals.

[biglig2]

Well, the ribbon is a good UI improvement... but... if you're going to totally change the UI of an important application, think of a way to make sure people can frickin' well find stuff!

I am constantly having to stop working and spend 5 minutes going up and down all the ribbon tags looking for something that I know how to do in Office 2003.

Couldn't they have thought of some way of not throwing away all the time I invested in learning the product?

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm picturing Kramer walking up to Bill Gates and telling him "You know what you are? ... You're a ribbon bully."

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

"We will be reviewing fundamental pieces of enabling technology, namely OSX Leopard, and copying from them as fast as we can. It'll take us close to two and a half years to create a bad copy of course, and there will be the new "digital handcuffs" feature which will deliver a high voltage shock to our users when they download anything we think might be pirated, like, pictures of their sister off her website, or if they rip their own CD, or install Itunes. But these are the kinds of cutting edge features that our users have come to expect"

Re:Fundamentals.

[BronsCon]

I thought FFS stood for 'Fuck! File System', used as an alternate name for NTFS when the partition corrupts itself and you lose all your data.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 2003:

none of the "Office Newbies" completed all of the tasks

and
Office 2007:

most of the "newbies" also completed most of the tasks

nice wording there.

Re:Fundamentals.

[LM741N]

Can't get on the net? Wow, that's exactly the Windows version that I am looking for! I use Windows only for a couple of scientific applications and usually disconnect the ethernet cable or wifi connection before booting into it.

But sometimes I forget, opening myself up to all kinds of potential virus, malware, keylogger misery.

Horray for MS!!

Re:Fundamentals.

[eneville]

I think they mean new software features.

For instance a completely new file system. i'm always left wondering why they dont use an opensource filesystem. it seems whenever someone reaches compatibility with their current default file system they go and change it. it would be really cool if they could just use ext3 or jfs...

every system admin out there has to battle with their inept business practices. we all use samba, so they go and change that. most things that are closed protocols die in a few years because there's no way of keeping up with their means of communication, so people flock to whatever is easy to implement and update with. pretty soon ms will be left on an island all of their own with no one who wants to talk with them.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at Costco. I'm a membership and returns clerk and I can look at detailed sales and receiving information for products. I also return opened software and have returned a number of Vista copies with the most common complaint being "it doesn't work on my system".

So much for you claims in that department.

Vista is selling fairly well at my store, though it is being outsold by lawn chairs.

Re:Fundamentals.

[NMerriam]

WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database.

A file system IS a database. Of course the issue is moot since WinFS will be released on the 43rd day of Lovermber in the year Two thousand and flibbity quard.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? You mean that you checked the inventory levels in the computer, and noticed you only sold two copies?

Actually, I work at a large ISP located in the metropolitain area with subscribers across the country and we keep statistics of what OS people connect with (in our call center as well as various trackers on servers) so we can better support our users and we haven't noticed a significant (i.e. => 1%) portion of Vista installs...

PC sales for the week of Vista's release are up 173% compared to the week previous, and up 67% versus the same week in 2006.

Sure, but hardly any of those PCs run Vista. If the point you were trying to make was about Vista selling more, quoting sales of PCs that haven't shipped with Vista is hardly the way to do it...

A lot of this is because of the massive FUD campaign against Vista that seems to be prevelent in the media....Hasn't anyone noticed that people said the EXACT SAME THINGS about Windows XP? Antivirus and CD burning programs were incompatible. Hardware support was sketchy. Games didn't run as fast. Everyone was going to stick with Windows 98, because it was "good enough".

Hasn't anyone noticed that MS saied the EXACT SAME THINGS about every other OS they've sold? "It's the most stable," "Easy to migrate to," "Most secure windows evar!" etc? Maybe people are finally starting to exercise caution? Maybe people are starting to think it's "just marketing"? Nah.. can't be.

There were complaints about how much XP Pro cost ($299/$199 upgrade). Five years later, and the "business" version of Vista is still $299/$199 - effectively, it's actually cheaper than XP professional was at launch.

Sure, now they have more competition, and realize they actually have to live up to their TCO claims, and even gain consumer goodwill, clean up their image. Even MS have acknowledged this. But wait'll you see how many tie-ins they have to get you to eventually purchase Ultimate if you want to do get a coherent experience, or even make use of otherwise "free" features in other software (since they tie-in to the convenient and already available Ultimate features... how many apps require WMP but actually really need it? Same with IE? Come on, there are more efficient and secure stacks for this...), etc.

Yes, just like XP Home refuses to upgrade over Windows 2000. This is neither new nor unexpected

Are you kidding? It's these kinds of artificial limitations that MS are really pissing off their users with.

At this point, I think you are just making shit up.

Vista isn't going to change anything.

Ah, the first thing you've said that I can fully agree with...

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I agree that the ribbon takes some getting used to, but after using it for a few months I find that it is actually much easier and faster to use than navigating the old menus.

Yeah I've got a few months to burn to adjust to an interface change. Gotta love those training costs.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty soon ms will be left on an island all of their own with no one who wants to talk with them.


And 90+% of the world will NEVER notice the difference. Forget your definition of standard. When you control 90% of the market, you ARE the standard. You Mac and Linux guys are not using the standard, the standard is currently NTFS, if you chose to use something else, that is your personal choice, you live with it.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Error27]

> PC sales for the week of Vista's release are up 173% [com.com] compared to the
> week previous, and up 67% versus the same week in 2006.

Normally PC revenue grows 20% from the last year. So the 63% makes sense, but it's not very impressive.

The 173% just means that people weren't buying PCs the week before. I heard that some stores in the Bay Area sold out their pre-vista stock and couldn't bring out the new stock until after the release. So really the 173% figure is not something to be proud of.

Re:Fundamentals.

[oni]

Of course the issue is moot since WinFS will be released on the 43rd day of Lovermber in the year Two thousand and flibbity quard.

oh that sucks. I'm going to be in the nova square sector getting my makleb polished on that day.

Re:Fundamentals.

[x-caiver]

When you typed "also called 'Vista RC2' by some people", that may have been a typo, but I'll clarify here for others.

Microsoft tries to use 'RC' the same way many other development companies do - 'release candidate' for a particular product. (some teams have a little trouble realizing that an RC is not just 'an extra beta' it seems). RC2 would be the 2nd such release candidate. In my opinion having a few (less than 4) is fine, and having two is perfectly reasonable. You release your release candidate, thinking you are done based on all the feedback you would have received on your betas, but then a customer finds some issue that they believe should be a ship blocker. If it is that important you fix it, and you throw out another release candidate - hopefully you only iterate once, if you have to iterate a dozen times you should probably rethink whether or not you are actually done with betas!

The use of the term 'R2' came with a Server 2003 add-on pack, with an incredibly unimaginative name. It wasn't a 'service pack' (it didn't fix bugs in the core server 2003 product), and it wasn't a 'roll-up' (it was not a collection of previously released hotfixes/qfes). It added several new, optional, features and I guess they didn't want to call it a 'feature pack' or an 'option pack' (both terms which seem to have a cloud over them)

So, if there was going to be some new set of things, like a file system, delivered for vista it would more likely be called 'Vista R2' than 'Vista RC2' :) (now, would Microsoft release a new file system outside of a core operating system release? That seems dubious - a support nightmare could easily spring out of that.)

note, I have no idea if there is a Vista R2 or not, I'm just talking about terminology

Re:Fundamentals.

[badonkey]

I entirely agree. I'd like to cast my vote as someone who has Vista running on a home desktop and laptop and is extremely pleased with the product. My girlfriend just got a laptop with it pre-installed, and is in love with it.

Vista is attractive (IMO), I have had zero issues with hardware (my girlfriend plugged in her old printer and Vista installed the correct drivers in a flash - it "just worked"), zero issues with stability, and zero issues with my software (my girlfriend even uses iTunes without a hitch). You can look at features and say it offers little that is overly revolutionary, but it really just feels better to use than XP.

Like my girlfriend, once average users get a taste of it, they ignore the media FUD. It's really rather pleasant to use.

Oh, and after installing my applications, I get UAC perhaps twice a week. One of those is because Acrobat is obnoxiously trying to silently update itself.

Re:Fundamentals.

[x-caiver]

WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database. Man, it is about time someone said that.

A file system is a way for a computer to organize a bunch of data in a manner that makes that data easy to find and access after it is stored. It has methods for reading / writing (updating) existing data, a way to store meta data about the data, and ways to make different pieces of data be related to others (folders, links, streams, etc).

That is -completely- different from a database! A database is a way for a computer to organize a bunch of data in a manner that makes that data easy to find and access after it is stored. It has methods for reading / writing (updating) existing data, a way to store meta data about the data, and ways to make different pieces of data be rela... Oh... wait... crap...

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Right. It's WinDB that's the new filesystem."

No, I heard it is WinFSF (Windows File System Forever).

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

This Microsoft we're talking about. Their "enabling technology" will most likely be "disabling technology", ie, intrusive DRM. Of course they'll market it as a positive.

Vista++ will probably infect non-DRM'd media as well, while at the same time requre TPM, "secure" monitors and "secure" speakers.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the other user is considering returning it as he can't even get on the net with it, despite have drivers for all of his hardware.

did this person try turning off ipv6? on the only vista release machine I've seen that fixed our networking problems.
[see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns /cableguy/cg0506.mspx#ENKAC for the registry hacking involved]

[damn "old" routers]

Re:Fundamentals.

[Shawn is an Asshole]

That would be nice... One that doesn't require manual defragmenting the hard drive (everybody else can do it...) One thing Microsoft needs to do is "innovate" a swap partition. That would definitely help with fragmentation.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Darby]

One thing Microsoft needs to do is "innovate" a swap partition. That would definitely help with fragmentation.

Create a partition and tell windows to use that for its pagefile. Don't use it for anything else.

Plenty of real criticisms to go around yada yada.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, we're based in the UK. We have a LEGAL OBLIGATION to accept returns under the sales of goods act, unless we have due reason to believe that we're bieng lied to. There is a system in place where we can report the product keys back to Microsoft UK and have them invalidated. Contract terms presented to the customer after the point of sale (ie, the EULA) are invalid, and we have a lot of customers that know that.

Secondly, the computer system allows anyone to view transaction records for any given item. It's a fairly basic (read: old) system with a single, shared login for any given branch. Yes, it's crap design, but it does what we need it to. The money can be spent better elsewhere.

This is neither new nor unexpected,
It is for the customer. There are no warnings on the packaging, nor any mention of that limitation on the literature thats been made available - to the customers or the staff. It's precisely because of that that we HAD to accept the return. Remember, most people aren't tech savvy - they buy something and expect it to work. They don't have the time or the patience to *make* something work. Apparently, your "farily large" store also provides free after-sale support!
Our most valued customers are our business customers. They're generally more aware of the alternatives, and so you HAVE to go the extra mile if you want to keep them. As well as the stores, there's a dedicated department at the (UK's) head office. The companies global headquarters is in the USA.

But Vista supports my hardware just fine - ALL of it
Good for you. But chances are (given that you're posting on slashdot) that you knew what you were buying in the first place, as opposed to commodity PC's. Chances are you know how and where to get drivers that aren't on the installation discs. Chances are you *DONT* have the silly little USB modems that broadband providers in the UK seem to love.
Most providers in the uk use the BT Voyager series ADSL modems. Here's a tip : They have no support under Vista. The manufacturer will not producing drivers for vista, and the providers are STILL sending these modems out to new installations.

Re:Fundamentals.

[rbanffy]

WinFS is neither a database, nor a filesystem. It's vaporware designed to create the perception Microsoft has some technology the others can't have.

It's been promised since NT 4.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll report that back to him as an option.

For what it's worth, he spent 6 hours on the phone to his ISP, Belkin, and Dell, and NONE of them were able to tell him why his machine was unable to connect. Belkin told him his machine was faulty, Dell told him that the ISP was at fault, and his ISP washed their hands of it.

That bieng said, this is a perfect example of things not working the way they should. The average user doesn't even know what the registry is, ffs.

Re:Fundamentals.

[SlayerDave]

The Home premium upgrade refuses to install over an XP pro installation,

That's simply not true. I upgraded Vista Home Premium over XP Pro last week, without any problems whatsoever (well, iTunes got hosed, but whatever). Now I did have problems related to product keys and activation when I installed 64-bit Vista HP over my 32-bit install, but regular 32-bit Home Premium will upgrade on top of XP Pro.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to cast my vote as someone who has Vista running on a home desktop and laptop and is extremely pleased with the product. My girlfriend just got a laptop with it pre-installed, and is in love with it.

Man, you have a girlfriend AND you like Microsoft Vista...

You are SOOOO using the wrong forum. :-)

Re:Fundamentals.

[the_womble]

BT Voyager modems seem (going on what a quick search turned up) to be problematic under Linux as well, so Windows is not doing much worse than the competition there.

One thing I keep trying to tell people is not to buy crap USB modems, but it is usually too late. Why will people pay plenty to get a fast processor, but buy the cheapest possible peripherals?

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that people aren't buying them - the service providers issue them as part of the service.

Most people don't know that they have a choice - when you get on ADSL in the uk, there's normally a two week delay before they get an engineer out to check the line. The end user gets some documentation, the modem, and maybe some CD's, and thats it.

Remember that most end users have no technical background, and little knowledge of the field. Most never even realise they have a choice when it comes to modems - and the providers end up charging them for the voyager even if they never use it.

By the way, 15 minutes between posting comments? Thats some serious anti-flood limit.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is too early for most users to upgrade, but Vista isn't going to destroy the internet or eat your children. It's a solid, stable OS.

That's what they said about Windows 95. I'll believe it when I see it.

Hasn't anyone noticed that people said the EXACT SAME THINGS about Windows XP? Antivirus and CD burning programs were incompatible. Hardware support was sketchy. Games didn't run as fast. Everyone was going to stick with Windows 98, because it was "good enough".

I don't remember anybody wanting to stay on Windows 98 (!), but I know lots of people who stayed with Windows 2000. My company finally upgraded to Windows XP, and AFAICT it's exactly the same but with a new paint job. I'm sure there are internal improvements (like reasons that the networking control panels are impossible to navigate now), but functionally, it seems identical. We would have saved a week of work, each, if we could have stayed with 2000. If Vista is going to be the same story, which it sounds like, why would anybody upgrade?

Apparently, my previous assertion that you don't work at a large store is true - none of the major stores allow customers to return opened software.

He said "large", not "major". You're replacing his words with different words that support your point. You can be a large store but not a major one.

Crap on Vista all you want. [...] It's Windows, people, with everything that being Windows entails. If you liked XP, you'll probably like Vista. If you hate Windows, buy a Mac or use Linux - Vista isn't going to change anything.

Alan Perlis said "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing". I believe the same is true of software: if it's still "everything that being Windows entails", it sounds like Windows 2000 with yet another paint job.

Re:Fundamentals.

[kkwst2]

You majored in hydrogen chloride???

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy defraging your disks.

Re:Fundamentals.

[theRiallatar]

Ahem.... Disable the network cards in Windows and you won't have to worry about it being online when you boot into it. Not to mention you're unlikely to actually get a virus/malware/keylogger without actually browsing the web.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, even the 'Major' chains (despite the GP's assumptions, our store is part of a fairly major chain) will accept opened software if the customer approaches them correctly.
If you ever need to and the clerk declines, ask to speak to the duty manager and explain the situation to them. At the end of the day, losing a customer through stubborness isn't something that a manager will want to do - especially if complaints affect their bonuses.
Often, the loss on the software (assuming the vendor doesn't issue credits) is significantly less than the projected value of most customers. The store will have a budget for shrink, and will simply write the loss off against that.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sorry you just invalidated your entire post with one sentance fragment.

You called windows a solid stable OS.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Aren't you just the hyper-aggressive little nerd who needs a bit of humility?

Re:Fundamentals.

[segfault_0]

Heres a novel idea. Maybe they held back WinFS and a couple of other pieces to justify a new operating system release right after Vista - nah... Microsoft wouldnt sink that low for a buck.

Re:Fundamentals.

[jZnat]

FFS is already a much better filesystem than anything Microsoft has spewed, and it was originally made for Unix!

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the kicker to the experiment that MS did was that they offered the participants a free copy of MS Office for doing the test. They could have their choice of a full version of Office 2003, or a beta copy of Office 2007 and a free copy of the gold version when it was released. Most of the "experts" took 2003, while the "newbies" took 2007. Just goes to show you how entrenched some people get.

But I thought you just said that the experts went from completing all of the tasks, to completing 'most' of the tasks in a longer period. So why are you surprised that they want to stick with the old way of doing things? The new UI is worse for them rather than being better, so why would they switch?

Re:Fundamentals.

[that this is not und]

It's also BSD, not GPL, so don't expect anybody here to sing it's praises.

--

Re:Fundamentals.

[that this is not und]

The philosophy behind it was to make the menus more context sensitive, to reduce the number of clicks necessary to get something done.

Uh, how about zero clicks??

I am still using Office 2000 at work, and being an old hand at this crap, I use [alt][file][save] to save documents. (thats the [alt] key, the f key, the s key for the mouse encumbered) Unless I am done working on a document, then I use [alt][file][exit] and hit an extra 'y' for yes when it asks if I want to save.

When I first switched from Office 97 to Office 2000, the friendly little spam-fuck 'help' feature popped up to tell me that I could 'save mouse clicks' by using the 'save' button up on the icon bar.

Uh. Fuck that. I am sorry, the mouse is for people who can afford slow-down features. I am not anti-mouse per-se because there are legitimate uses for a pointing device.

I am concerned that the anti-keyboard sentiment will go to such an extreme that the user will be marshalled away from ever using the keyboard except to enter the body text of a document.

One of the pleasures of life is knowing a lot of keyboard shortcuts and walking up to some gui-tubby-boy's computer where they only know the mouse commands. You reach over and hammer out a succession of [alt]f4's and watch as the windows disappear from their screen. They grip the mouse helplessly in their fat little hand, squeaking with fear.

alt-f4 is to close a window
control-f4 is to close a subwindow within an app
f2 is the best kept secret- it is used whenever a filename is selected, in explorer or even within a file-open dialogue box, to rename the file.

There are tons of others.

I have heard that one of the ways that an accounting firm can check up on the 'skills' of a new employee is to issue them a computer for the first week of work with no pointing device on it. Any number jockey who can't navigate Excel entirely without a mouse is an amateur.

(insert flames down here)

Re:Fundamentals.

[tftp]

I tried to use Word 2007 to write a 3-page document - gave up in disgust after 15 minutes of trying to find things that were obvious in Word 2003. Office 2007 is not coming to my office, thank you very much.

Re:Fundamentals.

[shmlco]

Point. One Best Buy near me had pulled nearly every computer and notebook off the floor in the week prior to the release.

Re:Fundamentals.

[ocbwilg]

Yeah I've got a few months to burn to adjust to an interface change. Gotta love those training costs.

Yes, take the quote out of context and bitch about it. No wonder that you posted AC. Do you really think that it will take you months to become productive with Office 2007, especially after the cited example of "office users" versus "office newbies"? If it does then you're obviously a little underpowered in the mental department. I didn't say that it took me a few months to learn the new interface. I was merely pointing out that I had been using for several months, and that I found it actually faster and easier to use than Office 2003.

One of the big things about Office was that the famed 80/20 rule applies. 80% of users only use about 20% of the functionality available, and the other 20% use the remaining 80%. Microsoft actually found that a high percentage of the feature requests received after Office 2003 were actually for features that were already in the product. So rather than blame the users for not knowing enough about Office, they decided to rework Office applications so that more of the functionality was exposed via context sensitivity. For example, in Word 2007 if you highlight a block of text you will see a text formatting toolbar materialize at the cursor. Now the tools that you are most likely to use are right in front of you. Not only do features like this reduce the amount of navigation and clicking necessary to complete many functions, but it has the added advantage of exposing functionality in a context-sensitive fashion that many users didn't even know was there.

So yeah, if you're an Office 2003 power user it may take you a couple weeks of semi-regular use (like it did me) to gain that almost instinctive level of familiarity with the features that you use. But the usability improvements for the most commonly used functions (many of which were navigation intensive before) can offset that loss in productivity fairly quickly. Why else were the Office 2003 "veterans" able to almost immediately accomplish the same amount of work?

Of course, I don't expect you to actually reply to this. I'm pretty sure that you just wanted to make some snarky remark and try to come off sounding smart about things. But since you brought it up I thought I would give the subject a fair shake.

Re:Fundamentals.

[falsified]

The beauty, and horror, of UI design is that you have to design with more than one user in mind. You worry that the UI people will abandon the keyboarders, thereby only thinking of one user, named "Not You".

Take your own advice. Plenty of people, experts included, like to watch the arrow thing move toward the word that corresponds to what they want to do. That's why computer companies were falling off their asses to get pointing devices to work. They're useful as hell. Keyboards aren't Christ, man.

Re:Fundamentals.

[fuzz6y]

A file system IS a database.

Which in no way implies that a database is a file system.

Re:Fundamentals.

[grungefade]

whheeew, im glad you like the new ribbon interface. I got nervous there.

I really don't get it. Everything type of technology or product there is practically, you have a group that bitches about it. On one side you have people saying, "it sucks, i wish they would make it better and make this better. They are so behind. They never update their products. (IE anyone)." And then you have the exact opposite when a company takes the time to improve their products to all the improvements needed or wanted. You have the other, "Its to different. They should wait until everything is that way to implement something new. I don't like all these new things trying to make our life's easier because now i don't know how to do all the things i used to do."

To throw in a personal opinion here. I like change. I am all for it on so many fronts. I am constantly implementing new things to improve productivity and results. I guess i just don't understand people. Example, Microsoft's IE was a huge target for ridicule, not having all the latest features most other web browsers had by default. So Microsoft then implements them, so what do you get? Oh my god, Microsoft copied tabs from Firefox. They copied this, they stole this. You can take this exact example and apply it with Vista and OSX.

Look, technology is going to move forward all the time. And its going to move faster and faster. And guess what? When a technology is adopted by the general public, all companies must implement that exact technology/feature for any chance to continue or enter the market. This copying thing is going to happen both ways to all companies as more and more standards are set.

I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future, Microsoft is practically forbidden from implementing any new feature into Windows. When outside companies invent new and new technologies that become a must need for running a computer. So anti-trust suites fly if Microsoft even thinks about adopting it. I mean its happening with Security Software. I'm sorry but its a downhill for them. Unless we are forced to have unsecure OS's so that we are forced to buy anti-virus software. It could have happened with Windows Media Player. Personally, id like to by an OS that does everything, and does it well. It doesn't sound fun to buy an OS, then a CD burning app, then anti-virus, media player, dvd player, hd-player, blue-ray player, and all unforeseen future technology.

Bottom line, who cares what company did what. I'm all for any company making new products. Whether its Mac or Microsoft. So unless you would like to halt improvements and choose to work with how it is, even if there are many ways to improve it. Shut the hell up, it gets quite annoying. Because i have a solution believe it or not....... DON'T UPGRADE YOUR DAMN PRODUCTS!!!!!

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like my girlfriend, once average users get a taste of it, they ignore the media FUD.

I can attest to this. Once I got a taste of badonkey's girlfriend, I knew I could safely ignore all the FUD...

Re:Fundamentals.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

So the 63% makes sense, but it's not very impressive.

It may not be "impressive", but it's hardly indicitive of Vista "not selling".

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. I just use ctrl-s to save a document. [alt][file][save] seems a rather roundabout way to do it.

Re:Fundamentals.

[UnknownSoldier]

> Windows 2000. My company finally upgraded to Windows XP, and AFAICT it's exactly the same but with a new paint job.

Obviously you've never done any development on the two OS's.

WinXP is NOT exactly the same as Win2K. They finally got around to fixing some of the memory leaks, and memory allocation bugs in WinXP.

Our 3D convertors (compiled with MSVS .net) allocates various memory sizes, with the total sizes being around a Gig. On the exact same set of hardware, Win 2K will return NULL on malloc, where as XP will return the allocated memory.

Re:Fundamentals.

[ocbwilg]

But I thought you just said that the experts went from completing all of the tasks, to completing 'most' of the tasks in a longer period. So why are you surprised that they want to stick with the old way of doing things? The new UI is worse for them rather than being better, so why would they switch?

I'm surprised because people have a tendency to want the newest stuff available, and that even though there was a learning curve it was obvious from the experiment that the new version of Office was actually easier to use. It's like going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, or from Windows 95 to Windows XP. Each time the user interface changed and it took some time to become proficient in it. But people still wanted the new version over the old.

Re:Fundamentals.

[faolan_devyn_aodfin]

WinFS is not a file system. It's more like an extension to the file system. WinFS run on top of NTFS and is really just an advanced indexing and database system for files.

Re:Fundamentals.

[gig]

They "design" their products by focus group. They brag about it, as if that is how you get customer or user feedback, feeding people donuts and asking them if they like stuff that's shiny. Meanwhile, out in the field their actual users are hurting for the basics and getting false negatives on their product activation codes.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Wow, put down the MSDN marketing brochure and take deep breaths.

Really? Because, your rant notwithstanding, the numbers tell otherwise.

You didn't do your homework on these numbers, as I'm about to point out.

PC sales for the week of Vista's release are up 173% compared to the week previous, and up 67% versus the same week in 2006.

According to NPD, that has nothing to do with Vista and everything to do with retailers clearing out XP inventory the week before. So yeah, when you destock and then restock the next week, you're going to get a spike in sales from the previous week.

A lot of this is because of the massive FUD campaign against Vista that seems to be prevelent in the media. It is too early for most users to upgrade, but Vista isn't going to destroy the internet or eat your children. It's a solid, stable OS.

Hey, this "FUD campaign" (the term used whenever someone doesn't want to address criticism) is Microsoft's fault. They promised and promised and promised. It's not my fault their engineers can't engineer while Apple kept on truckin'. Vista isn't that solid or that stable, the interface is terrible and inconsistent, it takes more clicks to do the same things, and it even runs your games slower while requiring more RAM just to display windows on the screen. The thing is so rushed and incomplete that they're already working on releasing SP1 later this year, or as I call it, "Vista 1.0."

When I opened the wireless connection dialog and saw a Properties button above another Properties button, it really hit home how completely disorganized Microsoft is. Did you know they had months of meetings just to determine the shutdown menu? Or that they had Macs sitting in their offices to copy from? Vista is a gigantic clusterfuck of legacy Win32 code dating back to the 1980s. Windows engineer Phillip Su actually wrote an entire article on MSDN about how bad it is--how it's riddled with circular dependencies, how nobody knows what all the layers are doing, and so forth. Not exactly confidence-inspiring.

And now they're doing it all over again with Vienna. I'll pass, thanks.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're busy orgasming over Vista, but you really should have tried a Mac two years ago, or even six years ago, because all this "new" stuff in Vista is old hat to us. Vista looks and feels like 2003-era technology. We should have been getting the next big thing by now.

So don't be surprised when people point that out.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Overly Critical Guy]

It is if the only reason for the spike is the pulling of stock the week before, as stated by NPD this week.

Prediction--Microsoft will do what they did to mask XP's disappointing sales by only citing figures of retailer orders and not actual sales to consumers.

Re:Fundamentals.

[gig]

The ribbon should be optional in the first version, duh. It doesn't matter how much testing they did, the real test is a release. By the time they release the next version of MS Office then all of the apps can feature an even more mature ribbon as the sole interface.

Re:Fundamentals.

[gig]

There is no reasonable defense for Clippy. It is wrong in every single way. Had Microsoft taken that interface and put it onto an instant messaging client then maybe you got something. Otherwise it is just wrong in every single way. Whatever Clippy was going to ask you it ought to already know or be able to figure out on its own and do the right thing without interrupting you. Any time that a UI interrupts the user that is a major failure. That is like a band having to stop mid-song and start again, or a movie print breaking midway and the house lights coming up. Especially in a text editor where supposedly the user is focusing on the content of what they are typing, it could be a letter to a dead soldier's family and "Hi! I notice you're writing a business letter! Would you like to make it look prettier?" That is a major disaster in a product demo that would never survive actual competition. It is embarrassing for Microsoft that writers run from Word like it has viruses ... oh, wait.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example of a potential Major League Zinger spoilt because the poster couldn't spell.

It's "sentence", dillweed.

Re:Fundamentals.

[gig]

> Yes, just like XP Home refuses to upgrade over Windows 2000. This is neither new nor unexpected

You just said:

- same old problem
- nothing new
- nothing unexpected

That is a typical Vista review from a major IT publication.

Re:Fundamentals.

[gig]

> Obviously you've never done any development on the two OS's.

> WinXP is NOT exactly the same as Win2K. They finally got around to fixing some
> of the memory leaks, and memory allocation bugs in WinXP.

> Our 3D convertors (compiled with MSVS .net) allocates various memory sizes, with the total
> sizes being around a Gig. On the exact same set of hardware, Win 2K will return NULL on malloc,
> where as XP will return the allocated memory.

Wow those are dramatic differences for an operating system that is almost 2 years more recent.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mvdwege]

Instead of snarkily attacking a strawman, you could actually try addressing his point: namely that keyboard shortcuts are being sacrificed to the almighty WIMP.

Parent was in no way disclaiming the usefulness of the WIMP interface, in fact he specifically addressed that issue by saying explicitly that there is a use for the mouse pointer, he was complaining about the keyboard being phased out entirely except for data entry.

Mart

Re:Fundamentals.

[mvdwege]

Hasn't anyone noticed that people said the EXACT SAME THINGS about Windows XP? Antivirus and CD burning programs were incompatible. Hardware support was sketchy. Games didn't run as fast. Everyone was going to stick with Windows 98, because it was "good enough".

People have noticed that. The howls of hardware not being supported persisted well into 2002, with XP being released in October 2001.

Do you have any numbers showing significant market penetration of XP within one year? Take a look at the back of the box on published games, and see how long it was before game companies finally dropped Win98 support. I know plenty of people who seriously didn't consider XP until 2003 rolled around, so I would be very interested to know whether or not these were exceptions to the rule.

Do you have any numbers to prove that WinXP adoption wasn't slowed down due to compatibility hassles, or are you just shilling?

Mart

Re:Fundamentals.

[mvdwege]

And then you swap out the network card and get the surprise of your life as Windows installs the driver and silently re-enables the network.

What idiot thought it a good idea to tie the network settings to the physical interface instead of the logical interface? Oh yes, Microsoft. Every time I finally get used to Windows enough to extend Microsoft some credit, they go and do something stupid like this.

At least in Linux, eth0 is eth0, no matter what hardware it is driving. And the same goes for every Unix and derivative out there. Considering how long *nix systems have had networking, I can't imagine why MS thought any other way was more logical, except for a terminal case of NIH.

Mart

Re:Fundamentals.

[ehanuise]

"Apparently, my previous assertion that you don't work at a large store is true - none of the major stores allow customers to return opened software." yup, great ways to do commerce : customer buys products, opens it at home, reads end user license agreement, eventually decides to disagree for whatever reason (incompatible, too restrictive, requirements not stated on the box/documentation that only appears while installing, ... not to mention the all too classic oem preinstalled on the machine wether you like it or not stuff.) and get a refund AS STATED IN THE EULA, and gets turned down at the retailed (we don't refund opened software) AND at the software maker (you must get your refund at your point of sales) This abuse has been going on for years, it's disgusting.

Re:Fundamentals.

[master_p]

If they wanted to really innovate, they should throw away on-screen menus and options all together, and do everything from context menus.

There is no point in having, for example, the toolbar for borders and tables on screen all the time, just because there is a table somewhere in the document. If I wanted to change something about the table, I would right click on it, bring up the related menu, and do it.

And the problem of having to move the mouse to reach the menu/toolbar would be solved.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

My understanding was that the ribbon was a suggestion by a summer intern they had a couple years back.

Re:Fundamentals.

[foooo]

You're misunderstanding the purpose of MS Research.

MSR is the part of Microsoft that is looking into prototypes and pure research in areas or technologies that are not ready for commercial software.They get to create stuff that is "really cool" but "clearly not ready for primetime". The other divisions partner heavily with folks in MSR, with the desire to create real world implementations.

The thing that you're asking for is usability testing. Both MSR and the divisions producing commercial product do usability testing, including focus groups, beta/alpha tests, market research, etc. But the product divisions (in this case Office) are responsible for the usability of their own product, and trust me... they do a LOT of work in this area.

So, recap...
MSR - Pure research, exploring new areas of technology or new ways of integrating technology... these are allowed to be quirky, narrowly aplicable or to be almost unusable by regular users... and also get very little exposure to actual customers.

Product Divisions - Actual products, that people can use every day (and will pay money for).

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

I know this (although MS recruiters do not--they only know about technical side and know nothing of the usability research that takes place in the normal product teams). But the thing is they were proposing a NEW user interface paradigm. This is something that should come out of research, not the product team. I'm sure the product team does user experience testing to a degree and that for the most part they are capable of testing their products usability. However, when you're creating a new interface paradigm you can't just do a couple of focus groups or informal user studies. There are a lot of issues to consider and it should be something that takes a few years to gestate, mature, and research. That's why I'm saying I don't think the new version of Windows should be introducing any new paradigm unless it comes out of MSR. Just like the Tablet PC OS didn't come out of MS products--it was a culmination of work done by MSR that got rolled into the MS product team after it was ready. If the MS product team had come up with it, then it likely would have gone the way of other tablet OSes.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

One that doesn't require manual defragmenting the hard drive (everybody else can do it...)

Why does this keep coming up with people?

NTFS doesnt really require defragmentation under typical scenarios. Yes, it will get fragmented, but it basically asymptotically approaches a finite fragmentation point and hovers around there.

'Regular Defrag' or 'Automatic Defrag' isnt necessary in a typical business scenario. In a corporate environment you dont defrag your servers, nor do you your desktops. It's just really not necessary except under certain circumstances where you rely on high performance sequential/streaming reads.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

Also, its important to note that WinFS will sit on top of NTFS, not replace it. NTFS (some minor version upgrade) will still be the underlying file system.

And to be honest, the only major thing missing from NTFS was transactional commits, and this is coming soon along with transactional registry reads/writes (Vista? can't remember). You got most of the benefits you care about from single-file/single-unit transactions with the journalling, which has always been there.

Re:Fundamentals.

[mikeisme77]

I've had my desktop at work consist of 90% fragmented files with an NTFS file system... Maybe if you're typical use is just browsing the net/using Office then this may be the case. However, if you use your computer for development then installing IDEs, APIs, project files, etc. will end up causing a fragmented drive.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

A big part of this is done in Office 2007 (at least in the ribbon-enabled products). Just click or highlight something and hover your mouse for a half-second.

Up pops a pseudo-context window with the most commonly used commands right there hanging off your mouse, so you dont have to move all the way up to the ribbon.

It is, in my opinion, a reasonable middle ground between everything in the menus/ribbon and everything in the context menu, neither of which is ideal.

And if you really want what you're talking about, you can get closer to it in office 2007 by using the 'minimize the ribbon' which auto-hides the ribbon until you move your mouse up there and click on the tab headings.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

No argument there. I must have 100,000 tiny .java files just in my c:\java\ hierarchy alone. I'm sure my drive is highly fragmented. (Of course, its arguable that development environments may not add much to fragmentation because most source code files are smaller than a single block size on modern drives.)

The question is: who cares?

Fragmentation != bad (for typical cases)

In other words, a high level of fragmentation does not necessarily indicate a slower system.

Fragmentation is inevitable in a file system, and not really a problem except under certain very specific use-cases like I mentioned above. For most users (streaming media being a counterexample), you just flat wont see a difference in perceived system performance from a highly fragmented drive.

Most modern OS's use a targeted optimization to put the most commonly read files in a group at the fastest point and defragments there (windows calls it superfetch or something similar in XP). For the most part, these are system files accessed during boot. The rest of the time, a fragmented drive just wont be that noticeable.

For many non-technical folk, defragmenting the hard drive is basically the equivalent of tech-voodoo, its like waving a burning stick over your computer and chanting, and will have about as much chance of making a noticeable performance difference as defragmenting regularly.

At least thats been my experince doing corporate IT for ~10 years ... at various times, we would see if we could measure performance differences after defragmenting, and it just wasnt there.

Now, that being said, I'm sure there are specific use-cases where it does make a difference. But in most cases, it doesnt. For example, in a busy IIS web server, turning off last-read timestamp updates on the file system can make a very noticeable performance difference, where defragmenting makes no noticeable difference.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

I've got to second ocbwilg's comments.

For most competent folk, who spend alot of time on their computer, the mental adjustment period will be about an hour of use, in my experience.

And for a very large percentage (maybe 80% or so for me) of features, they will be immediately visible and obvious.

I think many people will find, like I did, that this is a much more intuitively organized interface, and just makes a lot more sense.

Yes, it will eliminate some of your burned-in muscle-memory for where certain functions are, but within a few uses, you will probably see net time saved because the interface is so much less deep, and just flat requires fewer clicks and movement than before.

And OH LORD the auto-formatting as you hover over choices. Remember in the old versions, how you wanted to test changes for a feature that is buried like 8 clicks deep. And how sometimes it would take 4 or 5 tries to get it looking how you like? This is just gone in the new interface, as the formatting temporarily applies as you hover over the formatting choice.

Give it a try, I think for the vast majority of people, within a month, they will be praising MS for the change. Seriously. Say what you will about Vista, the ribbon interface is something they got right, hit it right on the head.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

In addition to Darby's response, which works great, you can also just set the swap to a fixed size right after installing windows.

It'll be one contiguous block (or a very small number of large blocks, which is fine for a swap file), and never change.

A swap partition is more elegant, but MS is somewhat caught here by their drive-lettering scheme. The swap partition would have a drive letter, and would probably confuse the heck out of non-technical folks. Then they'd have to hide the partition, and that would just cause more yelling of tech folks, etc etc.

Anyway, you can get all the benefits of a swap partition very easily on windows, its just not the default, unfortunately.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Allador]

Focus groups dont design products or enhancements.

Individuals or small groups of professionals in a brainstorm session do so. They then use focus groups to test and evaluate the ideas.

They also use personal feedback from partners, large customers, and PSS (ie, MS support call) statistics. They also do private betas.

Now granted, for your specific example (activation) I doubt if its seen much in the way of focus groups, so your usability and hard core testing is happening in the wild. But for many of their systems and products, they do insane amounts of usability testing and planning. Unfortunately, prior to recent versions of windows, the vast majority of what they were targeting was non-IT folks, so you end up with dumbed down interfaces or systems.

Re:Fundamentals.

[StikyPad]

Woohoo, that's my birthday!

Re:Fundamentals.

[webview]

Apparently, my previous assertion that you don't work at a large store is true - none of the major stores allow customers to return opened software.

I haven't read the box for Vista yet but every Microsoft program that I have seen gives you a full 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee (even opened software). I was surprised by this, but actually took advantage of it a few years ago.

You might have to argue with the store manager, but it says right on the box you can return it.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Dal Platinum]

CTRL-S for save is a winner.
Alt F S requires too much movement. I don't have time to move 3 fingers, goddammit.

Also, Windows Key + E = new explorer window is one of my most used shortcuts. Most people don't know about it.

If you're still reading, get yourself a copy of winkey. It will let you add extra windows key shortcuts. I have Win+Q for firefox, Win+C for a command prompt, etc.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm off out to the yard to smash up some spinning jennys. I can't understand how they take sheep hair and make wool out of it.

Therefore I shall crush it with rocks.

Re:Fundamentals.

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I'm aware of both suggestions. Creating a partition (and drive letter) is a hack. What you mention is an improvement, but it's not as elegant as a swap partition.

The swap partition would have a drive letter, and would probably confuse the heck out of non-technical folks. It's not like it'd have to be visible to the user. It's possible to have hidden partitions in Windows. For example, Windows Disk Protection (part of the Shared Computer Toolkit) keeps it's data in a hidden second partition.

Also, in Windows 2000+ (unsure about NT4) it's possible to mount a partition into a folder. So, it's not like a drive letter is a requirement.

Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wonder why Microsoft cannot afford to (or just will not) put more manpower on the job.
A company like this should be able to look at security in XP and develop Vista in different teams at the same time, shouldn't it?

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[toejam316]

Why be a AC? You seem to forget two things. 1. Microsoft is more or less satan, corprotized, and 2. You have a extremely good point.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[omicronish]

I always wonder why Microsoft cannot afford to (or just will not) put more manpower on the job. A company like this should be able to look at security in XP and develop Vista in different teams at the same time, shouldn't it?

They do. After Windows is finished, the dev team proceeds to work on the next version, while a team called Windows Sustained Engineering takes over the released version. From the link:

Security fixes are not WSE's only concern. In fact, once a version of Windows is released to manufacturing--or declared "golden"--the product team that developed it transfers the source code to the group. WSE then has primary responsibility for any further work over the next seven years (the supported life of the product), including hotfixes, security patches, updates (critical and noncritical), security rollups, feature packs, and service packs.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[jcr]

There is no shortage of manpower at Microsoft. There is a severe shortage of vision, and managerial competence.

-jcr

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

So the This is the same timeframe Microsoft claims it would have utilized for Vista, had they not put Longhorn 'on the back burner' to deal with security issues in XP. in the abstract is just bull?

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[ZachPruckowski]

There's a diminishing return on manpower. There's only so much the operating system can be fragmented, and each group can only be so large. That was part of Vista's problem - too many people having a say.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I don't think so. It's just an immensely bureaucratic, huge organization by now.

The *system* prevents all that manpower from delivering great results; being chained they just can't.

Pretty much like Socialism worked out for the Soviets.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[aussie_a]

Yes but surely Vista and XP can be completely fragmented, in that you shouldn't need to have people assigned to Vista pulled from it to work on XP if you're willing to simply hire more people. So either they did throw non-Vista people at XP and the summary is bullshit, or they're not willing to put enough people into their operating systems (which is simply mind boggling).

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[DarkOx]

Most likely because dispite Microsoft's reality vortex they still at least have the balls to admit to themselves that software still has not been realized as an engineering discipline. It would be nice if a large software project could be broken out into little modules with clear specifications that any coder could go off and make but it usually can't. Lots of development is very iterative, which means everything is changing. Lots of time stuff just has to be built to see how workable or unworkable it really is in practice; but when I change my interface it breaks your module. Maybe that is a minor problem easy to fix or maybe its a show stopper, how can I know.

Most large projects seem to work best with a few core team people who know basically how everything works at least at some level and can then farm out small clearly defined tasks to others. Their total bandwidth is bound to be limited though and so more 'others' does not always help. Growing the core team won't help much either because communication between them has to be total and constant, that is going to take longer the more specialed and nemerous those guys become.

Look at the Linux kernel for instance. You have Linus and pretty small core team that has different specialties. I know all those core team guys have some familiarity with the entire thing and Linus absoultly does. You can tell that from reading LKN. Maybe Jens is a block layer wizard but he know s how the network and VM layers work. He has to know inorder to mange block layer development well. He then has lots of other people submitting smallish patches and fixes to what is primarily his project.

I think we can reasonably assume that the Linux kernel and core GNU stuffs, includeing things like Gnome, have more developers.[qualified] contributing then M$ can put on windows even if they wanted. While those projects do seem to progress more rapidly then Windows its not by any means in an earth shattering way.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[JohnFluxx]

I've never understood why basic apps like the calculator and the character selector etc apps don't receive any love.

They seem like great places were a couple of developers could just be given the job to fix them up. Yet they never seem to improve.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain to me why they had to pull quite a resources away from Vista to finish of Windows XP SP2? maybe it's a bit of all the above, or too many chiefs and not enough indians.

mature.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[tomhudson]

"After Windows is finished, the dev team proceeds to work on the next version, while a team called Windows Sustained Engineering takes over the released version."

And therein lies the problem. There is zero incentive to do it right the first time. After all, once its' out the door, its someone else's problem.

The people who actually wrote it should be responsible for fixing it - not writing the next-gen fuckup.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Movi]

Ah, because the problem is not putting more manpower on the job, but putting less. Right now there's a overpopulation on the project. Notice how many people work on Vista and how many on Mac OS X (ignoring for a moment the BSD userspace tools). More manpower != better results.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

also business ethics, fufilling end customers needs and "do no harm" in general.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[tomhudson]

10 reasons

1. Don't forget that the vast majority of people working for Microsoft don't code.

2. Also, that their corporate culture has been known to be sucky for almost 2 decades (hint: nobody likes being shuted at).

3. And that you can make as much or more money elsewhere (Microsoft stock options are no longer a real incentive)

4. You can enjoy more autonomy at almost any other company

5. People want to have a life outside of work (follow-up to #2)

6. Its more fun being a larger part of a small project than a faceless cog in a large project (follow-up to #4)

7. A lot of the interesting stuff just isn't being done by Microsoft

8. Clueless VPs spouting bullshit:

   Corporate Vice President of Development Ben Fathi is already discussing features for the next OS: "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

   A perfect example of someone who should be kept locked away from the media until they have something concrete to say.

9. Windows and Microsoft aren't seen as being cool any more, and haven't been for a decade.

10. Who wants to be associated with crap products that are responsible for most of the zombies/worms/viruses?

I mean, really ... Ben Fathi is supposed to be the guy overseeing everything, and he says "I don't know what it is" about what's next, and this is news????

Ben Fathi serves as corporate vice president of development for the Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD) at Microsoft Corp. He oversees the development of core components of Microsoft Windows, including the kernel, and technologies associated with security, networking, virtualization, setup and deployment.

Fathi previously served as corporate vice president of the Security Technology Unit (STU), where he was responsible for delivery of all core security technologies, including the authentication, authorization and audit capabilities (AAA) of Microsoft products; Windows Rights Management Services (RMS); BitLocker drive encryption; and anti-virus, anti-spyware and network security protocols. Fathi also managed the Security Engineering and Communications team, the Security Response Center and the Security Outreach team, all of which focus on helping protect customers from online security threats.

So, he says he doesn't know what the next big thing in Windows is going to be ... here's a suggestion - new graphics and artwork to make it look more like OSX, a new startup sound that cost a billion instead of a few measly million to "enhance the user experience some more", a Duke Nukem Forever interactive screen-saver, and ribbons with dropdowns with flyouts with popups with menus, so that the user has at least 10 different ways to get to any particular option. And not one, not 2, but FOUR new programming languages - D minus (to replace C sharp), DOT NOT (a .net replacement that is ultra secure by refusing to do ANYTHING), J-Script/XML+J-Script/CSS for those who want to continue to build non-standard web sites, as well as Internet Explorer 9 - will only allow you to visit microsoft-signed sites, and a revamped cmd.exe and windows kernel that will only allow access to 640k of ram per process so that no application can ever be a resource hog. This last spec will be known as "Microsoft Dynacode Operating System 1", or MS-DOS 1.0. Plans call for an optional text interface sometime by 2012, and the removal of mouse support by 2015, because they can sell ms keyboards for more than mice.

Oh, and their engineering slogan will be "Windows ain't done until Wine won't run."

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[C0R1D4N]

Is that really logical? They hand the source code over to a group of people who now have to familiarize themselves with everything AND find/fix the security holes? Why not turn the people who worked on it for 5 years or however long into the WSE team?

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[justthinkit]

When you have a totally mature product/market (in this case, operating systems) it is essential that you degrade parts of your product with every new release. Think of it as planned obsolescence for things that never break down.

The first time I saw Microsoft doing this clearly was the media player in Windows 9x. The previous MP was less capable but it worked with the frickin' keyboard. The new one _at first_ would not respond to the keyboard but once you clicked on a menu it would. This took away some automation potential in a nearly invisible way.

The second obviously crippled application is MS Paint. It is crippled in that it never improves. Today's MS Paint is so ridiculously incapable that it can't (1) Ctrl+F display the full image if it is larger than your desktop -- you can scroll it but nothing more, (2) select an image portion that is larger than the Paint window (or at least I haven't found the magic pixie keystrokes), (3) simply scale an image.

Windows ME, of course, had to be slower than Win2000. Even though it wasn't. So, just introduce some useless piece of crapola indexing thing that never stops and voila.

Vista (and the equally dreadful MP v11 for XP) is just the latest careful crippling of an already feature complete product so that, several versions down the road, they can fix these cripplings and introduce new ones at that time.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[ericlondaits]

You should take a look at this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/ 25/141253.aspx

Just a small preview of what you'll find inside:

I find it ironic when people complain that Calc and Notepad haven't changed. In fact, both programs have changed. (Notepad gained some additional menu and status bar options. Calc got a severe workover.)

I wouldn't be surprised if these are the same people who complain, "Why does Microsoft spend all its effort on making Windows 'look cool'? They should spend all their efforts on making technical improvements and just stop making visual improvements."

And with Calc, that's exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. "Look at Calc, same as it always was."

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[RightSaidFred99]

Not really feasible. You don't want your best and brightest developers doint sustaining work. There is an easy way to give incentive to people - make them accountable if the product sucks. I think your point seems on its surface to make sense, but in the real world it doesn't.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[RightSaidFred99]

You were doing good on numbers 1-6, but then you just went off into geeky-dweeb make-believe world on the rest, then you went completely fugue state on us with the rest of your comments.

First, MS is doing tons of interesting stuff. You have no idea. My guess is you're just some random systems admin, or that whatever you are you aren't a developer. Go look around on MSDN. MS is doing very cutting edge stuff on the development front, the only industry player even close is IBM.

Second, you seem to have a very provincial view. Nobody but the geekiest of the geeky dweebs really hates Microsoft. Many people still think they're cool, and a lot of people are actually professionals and learn the best technology for the task and don't care if they're "cool".

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

> After all, once its' out the door, its someone else's problem.

I would like to staple an apostrophe to your forehead.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[cypherz]

"First, MS is doing tons of interesting stuff. You have no idea."

Like what? I haven't heard anything vaguely interesting (other than cool FUD) coming from Redmond in years.

"My guess is you're just some random systems admin, or that whatever you are you aren't a developer. Go look around on MSDN. MS is doing very cutting edge stuff on the development front, the only industry player even close is IBM."

IBM has some interesting projects. MS has nothing close to IBM. You believe MS's stuff is "cutting edge" because they keep telling you it is.

"Nobody but the geekiest of the geeky dweebs really hates Microsoft. Many people still think they're cool"

If you think that, all I can say is that you're not a developer. I don't know anyone *at all* that thinks MS is "cool" and I've been a developer for 20 years. Frankly there's not much left in IT that is in the cool category.

"and a lot of people are actually professionals and learn the best technology for the task and don't care if they're cool."

You're correct on this one. And MS is rarely the best technology for the task.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[x-caiver]

Microsoft can develop XP service packs and Vista on different teams at the same time. There is a 'Sustained Engineering' team that owns a product once it has released - so they own service packs, hotfixes, security patches, etc.
The problem is that the two teams (the core team that makes the new one, and the SE team that maintains the old one) are staffed differently. The core team is, by necessity, must bigger. It has a much larger dev/test/pm count because making a 'new things' means you have to touch a lot more stuff than 'maintaining' something. (well, optimally!) Also, the type of developer needed to maintain existing code is different than the type of developer needed to come up with new ways to do stuff. The maintainer needs to be able to fix bugs in existing code, sometimes come up with new subroutines. The person coming up with new stuff needs to... come up with new stuff.

Now, the problem with something like XP SP2 is that it was partially maintenance, and partially new stuff. Their are a huge number of changes in it - and some of them are not at all minor. To do this work the core PM team wrote specs for new features, the core dev team wrote new features, and the core test team came up with new tests and automation to verify the thing worked. During that time they were unable to work on Vista.

Server 2003 SP2 is being done by the SE team, so while the core team is working on Longhorn Server - that is how it is supposed to work. (there is collaboration at individual levels of course, for example SE devs asking core devs why certain things were done in the original code, and core testers asking SE testers if the new tests that are being developed are appropriate for sustained testing).

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

> The people who actually wrote it should be responsible for fixing it - not writing the next-gen fuckup.

But they have already half written all the bits for the 'next-gen', those bits which they failed to finish for 'this-gen' before it was pushed out the door.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

gp: "First, MS is doing tons of interesting stuff. You have no idea."
parent: Like what? I haven't heard anything vaguely interesting (other than cool FUD) coming from Redmond in years.

There's a huge amount of stuff, poke around on http://research.microsoft.com/

three links from the front page I found this [I clicked on redmond, interactive visual media, then photo tourism]
http://research.microsoft.com/vision/InteractiveVi sualMediaGroup/PhotoTours/

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[VGPowerlord]

Also, that their corporate culture has been known to be sucky for almost 2 decades (hint: nobody likes having chairs thrown at).

Fixed.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing cutting edge about doing something that others have already done - and that is all that is on Microsoft's Research site. The only research they do is into other's ideas that they can (a) steal, (b) borrow, (c) license, (d) buy, or (e) copy. The link you pointed out is just one such example. Places like Google Earth have used similar technologies for quite some time, and they were far from the first as well (except, unlike MS, they arent claiming it's something new).

- RobertMfromLI

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[JohnFluxx]

And yet I cannot even do the most basic sqrt( 3^2 + 4^2) equation.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[ericlondaits]

Is that a joke that just flew over my head?

I can do the equation just fine...

3
^2
M+
4
^2
M+
MR
Inv(^2)

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[JohnFluxx]

Yeah after I hit submit, I just knew that some smartass would point out the memory store thing. But let's be honest - that's hardly a great way to do sums.

But seriously, consider that against the $15 calculator I bought where I type in: ( 3 + 4 ). It's all shown in graphical detail on the screen, and when I press enter, it shows the answer, and can show it as a fraction etc.

This isn't a fancy TI calculator, but pretty much the most basic cheapest calculator you can get with sin, cos etc functions.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[ericlondaits]

I've seen some strange cheap calculators in my life... like one that solved quadratic equations, or another that allowed expresions like 3^2+5^2. But I'd hardly call those standard. I'm not crazy about Windows' calculator, but it works like most normal calculators do (except for the weird "Inv" thing, which comes handy anyway)... ... anyway, as a CS student taking math classes being able to type expressions like 3^2+5^2 in the calculator is not really useful. You actually need a reverse polish stack, like the one in the HP calculators, to do serious work easily. But reverse polish takes a while to get used to (specially since few people are taught in school how to do it), so it's no surprise that the Windows calculator doesn't feature it.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[JohnFluxx]

My point about the hand held calculator was that it's not strange. I'm not talking about a high end TI, but a _standard_ calculator that does cos/sin.

You've never needed to do basic stuff like a*b + c*d + e*f etc that's just so nice to do on a handheld calculator but just difficult to do in windows calc?

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[ericlondaits]

I once had a calculator that allowed me to write

a*b + c*d + e*f

and then press the "equal" key and get the result. But it wasn't standard. It wasn't a TI either... just a common, cheap scientific calculator. But once again, not standard.

That calculator also requires people to know about order of precedence, which becomes a problem when people type in:

3 + 2 * 5

meaning

(3 + 2) * 5

The M+ and MR keys are the normal way, in a very standard calculator, to solve polynomials... it might sound tricky, but calculators always require some degree of training.

And finally, my point was that for serious use it's not of much use having the calculator be able to solve

a*b + c*d + e*f ... if you're serious, you're better of with reverse polish: which doesn't imply that the calculator must support graphics or custom programming (like TIs). A simple, cheap, scientific calculator could very well have a reverse polish stack. It's just a different way of entering data.

In a reverse polish you'd enter a*b + c*d + e*f like:

a
b
*
c
d
*
+
e
f
*
+

and you'd get the result. It's easy, because you can start typing as you read the written formula and doesn't require parentheses.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Sax Maniac]

They seem like great places were a couple of developers could just be given the job to fix them up. Yet they never seem to improve.

Maybe they did, and you didn't notice?

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[jcr]

The *system* prevents all that manpower from delivering great results; being chained they just can't.

Exactly. That's managerial incompetence,like I said above.

-jcr

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[robinvanleeuwen]

Because they are two pieces of software that aleady do what they do best.
You shouldn't always mess with a good thing just because you can. 'Keep it
simple stupid', and 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' come to mind.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[wintermute000]

I'll agree some of the Enterprise stuff M$ has been coming out with is of a much higher quality than their previous efforts (Server 2003 vs NT for example!!! the entire AD/Exchange thingy that underpings 90% of corporate desktop infrastructure). But mate leave the personal comments out of it. If you didn't understand the rest of his comments, fine, but no need to get personal. I take it you regard yourself as a top developer, well I'm not a developer but I don't see anything M$ is doing that is in any way cutting edge, some of it is very good but its not 'cutting edge' in the sense that its original and new. Doesn't mean its not any good, or that it may be the best tool for the job, but as for innovation, you gotta be kidding. (unless your idea of innovation is to completely bork existing open standards and implement your own then leverage your market share to make it the de facto standard, in spite of its suckiness). And I'll disagree with your provincial view remark, a large chunk of the IT industry hates M$ aside from the wintel boys and they only tolerate it because it earns them a crust. Heck I'm in network services (ie a cisco shop) and everybody rags on windows. I guess the previous poster stepped on a few nerves?

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[tomhudson]

"My guess is you're just some random systems admin, or that whatever you are you aren't a developer."

Wrong. I'm a developer for an internet search engine, currently working on a web 3.0 (that's right 3.0, not 2.0) project.

"Go look around on MSDN."

Give me a break. Next you're going to tell me that MCSEs are "real developers too."

"Nobody but the geekiest of the geeky dweebs really hates Microsoft."

Most people don't like microsoft. Most people have a love/hate relationship with their computers, until they abandon microsoft for something else. Most people realize that the code quality of microsoft software is abysmal, that they're more interested in their bottom line and user lockin than in their customers' well-being, and that only the dorkiest of dorks really loves microsoft.

"a lot of people are actually professionals and learn the best technology for the task"

... which is rarely if ever from microsoft. Only inertia keeps most users from switching away.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[toddestan]

On the other hand, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. While they can get away with shipping basic utilities like Paint and Notepad with their OS, if they tried to make them more powerful, they could find themselves in court against Adobe and Corel for illegal bundling again. For that reason, they probably aren't ever going to make any real changes significant changes to those programs so long as they hold a monopoly on the desktop.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[Allador]

You can actually do it without the memory store, using the parenthesis built into the calc program.

You just need to change it to scientific mode. From the pull-down menus, click on View, then Scientific.

Then type on the calc:

( (this is a button)
3
[x^y] (this is a button)
2
+
4
[x^y]
2
)

as soon as you hit the closing parenthesis, you get 25.

Now, you dont get the entire string shown and then click 'do' and get a result, it does it as you type it in, like a traditional calculator.

Re:Delays because of doing other work

[rbarreira]

Linux progressing faster than windows? By what measure?

Purge time

[Dobeln]

Could someone start a petition to purge "enabling" from the english language? Please?

Re:Purge time

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, to associate it with the Enabling Act whenever it occurs.

Re:Purge time

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone start a petition to purge "enabling" from the english language? Please?

Disabling enabling? No way.

Re:Purge time

[jejones]

Sorry, that will have to wait until the petition starts to get rid of "empowering."

Re:Purge time

[Anpheus]

I attended a Microsoft conference (there goes my karma) and now I feel like "leveraging" my foot up someone's...

Re:Purge time

[toriver]

Going forward, that will be effectuated.

Subject

[Legion303]

"It's too early for me to talk about it"

Translation: "We haven't figured out who we're going to rip off yet. Probably Apple."

Re:Subject

[lewiz]

Nah, I think that'd be too obvious. They need to rip-off different companies in some sort of random order.

New user paradigm... I'm not sure Apple's user paradigm is still new.

The hypervisor comment is interesting. Lots of people are doing virtualisation: there's VMware, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Xen... the list goes on! But you can be sure that whatever it is, it won't be compatible with any other others.

Re:Subject

[jcr]

What choice do they have? Be is out of the picture, and Linux is still playing catch-up to Solaris.

-jcr

Re:Subject

[timmarhy]

linux playing catch up to solaris? on the desktop? are you fucking insane?

Re:Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on you people. It's a competitive market. Tipping off competitors to what they have planned for the future is dangerous. It's freaking *OBVIOUS*.

They don't want to reveal the secrets of the new filesystem they are developing: WinFS.

Re:Subject

[gathas]

Simpsons, Talking about new Duff Beer Products at the Brewery: Guide: What does the future hold for us? Heh. Let's just say we have a few ideas up our sleeve. Homer: Like what? Guide: Um, I'd rather not get into it right now. Homer: Why not? Guide: All right, we don't have any ideas for the future. We got nothing. Happy? Homer: [whiny] No. -- So much for innovation, "Duffless"

Re:Subject

[catchblue22]

Vienna really isn't that far away from Cairo.

Re:Subject

[nomadic]

Linux is still playing catch-up to Solaris.

I thought Linux was playing catch-up to OS X (which considering how much longer Linux was in development, is kind of sad).

Re:Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know how many desktop users switch from Ubuntu Linux to Solaris 10?
Almost 4 in the past year alone.

Re:Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Linux was playing catch-up to OS X Nope. OSX stinks.

Re:Subject

[drsmithy]

I thought Linux was playing catch-up to OS X (which considering how much longer Linux was in development, is kind of sad).

OS X is NeXTSTEP 5, and has been in development since the mid-late-80s.

Re:Subject

[nomadic]

OS X is NeXTSTEP 5, and has been in development since the mid-late-80s.

Well as an operating system as whole, a lot of Linux is GNU and XFree86, and has been in development just as long. And the scale of NeXTSTEP development is dwarfed by Linux development. If you were to compute the number of man-hours that went into developing NeXTSTEP and OS X and let's even throw in the Mach kernel, I'm sure it would be far, far less than that of Linux, and the end result is a comparable OS that surpasses Linux on several fronts.

I first used Linux in 1993; it's a much fuller experience now, but honestly after 14 years of development I would expect there to be a much more massive change. Windows 3.1-Windows XP is a much bigger jump. The fact that Linux still surpasses Windows is more of a result of a) how bad Windows started out, and b) Microsoft's poor management of the development process. But just because MS mismanages a closed, proprietary development process, doesn't mean that such a process is fundamentally worse than an open source process.

I think that one of the reasons a lot of Linux zealots come down so hard on OS X is it's a very obnoxiously obvious example of a mostly non-open source project being very successful.

Re:Subject

[Anonymous Coward]

We haven't figured out who we're going to rip off yet. Probably Apple. Actually I think they are creating something really innovative and are trying to keep it as secret as possible. If they would tell what they are planning to do next someone would copy it.

Re:Subject

[Peter La Casse]

Vienna really isn't that far away from Cairo.

And both have the same number of vowels as Chicago. I sense a pattern forming.

In fact, if you graph it out, you'll see that Vista actually has *fewer* vowels than those three. It's like Microsoft is acknowledging that Vista is a step down (at least in vowel count), and they're hoping that Vienna will bring back the good ol' days.

Re:Subject

[93 Escort Wagon]

"It's too early for me to talk about it"

Translation: "We haven't figured out who we're going to rip off yet. Probably Apple."

New translation: "OS X Leopard isn't out yet - get back to me in summer."

Re:Subject

[FreonTrip]

You're forgetting about the substantial quantity of OS X that's based upon various forms of BSD, an operating system which has been in development since the 1970s.

Re:Subject

[DavidTC]

That's a rather misleading statistic.

Two of them switched back, and a third probably would have but had a heart attack.

And the fourth guy worked at Sun.

Re:Subject

[jcr]

I thought Linux was playing catch-up to OS X

No, its not even in the same stadium as OS X. Linux is the eventual replacement for Solars, IRIX, HPUX, etc. It's not a contender for desktops.

-jcr

Vienna

[Anonymous Coward]

This means nothing to me.

Re:Vienna

[Macthorpe]

Well I laughed, at any rate.

Re:Vienna

[cybergen007]

So in other words it's Hasta la Vista Baby

Alternative names for it?

[Funkcikle]

I am not too impressed by the name of "Vienna", especially since I happen to like the place.

I think something along the lines of Windows Hindenburg would be more appropriate. Or does anyone have a better name?

Re:Alternative names for it?

[admactanium]

I think something along the lines of Windows Hindenburg would be more appropriate.

Windows Hindenburg. Oh the TRANPARENCY!!

Re:Alternative names for it?

[maharg]

Windows Titanic, or WinTit for short

Re:Alternative names for it?

[lanswitch]

Windows Waterloo.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

New Jersey.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[JustOK]

Great song. They would only need the A and B keys on the keyboard, too.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Joebert]

It should be changed from "Windows" to "Doors".

Such a change could stop the croocks from trying to break in all the time, everyone knows crooks are too parahnoid to go in through the door.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[JonathanR]

Vista Service Pack 1

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from Vista, we need something that says 'Laughing Stock'.

How about 'Windows Boston'?

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows ME, 2

Re:Alternative names for it?

[XenonChloride]

Windows Jonestown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

Re:Alternative names for it?

[frdrx]

How about `Windows Guantanamo' or `Windows X-Ray'?

Re:Alternative names for it?

[aussie_a]

Codename Australia. The place where no-one really wants to go but gets forced to go there anyway ;)

Re:Alternative names for it?

[BrokenHalo]

It should be changed from "Windows" to "Doors".

Why not simply "Gates"?

Re:Alternative names for it?

[dduck]

Windows Meh. Captures the "wow", and a reference to Windows ME to boot!

Re:Alternative names for it?

[jejones]

Ah, but with that name we can eventually quote Ringo Starr.

"It's all down to goodnight Vienna..."

And when the schedule slips, Eddie Jobson's "Disturbance in Vienna" can play in the background of news stories and podcasts about it.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Joebert]

Because we'd miss out on all the profits from "Doors" by skipping to "Gates".

Re:Alternative names for it?

[dparnass]

How about Windows 'Katrina', or Windows 'New Orleans'

Re:Alternative names for it?

[kfg]

Windows Osborne 2.

KFG

Re:Alternative names for it?

[srwood]

Windows Waco

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

They hacked in through my windows with brute force, messed up the documents on my desktop, then went joyriding in my drive and crashed it. Tell me more about doors.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[KwKSilver]

Windows Gold-digger [your bank account = The gold mine].

Seriously, they should put out WinSS, Super Secure Windows. It boots up from an encrypted, write-protected drive. Then it does whatever MS wants it to do, and you get to sit and watch, and only watch, because the keyboard, mouse, and any other potential input device are disabled by default. Meanwhile, its cameras & microphones detect everything you do and say in your home, and transmit it through an always-on connection to ... somewhere. TA-DA! ;-)

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Next one: Windows Dancing Queen

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Joebert]

They hacked in through my windows with brute force, messed up the documents on my desktop, then went joyriding in my drive and crashed it. Tell me more about doors.

Doors will be designed with more than one person going in and out in mind, a key feature of Doors will be Doormats.
Doormats will serve as an extra layer between users & Doors to help keep the dirt out.
Doormats will be designed knowing the dirt can always eventually overwhelm a Doormat & Doormats will be disposable & easily changed.

Doors will have unique keys which allow every user into only the areas they're allowed to be & no one key will be able to access everything.
While it's been considered, it's been decided that combining the Doormat & unique key features for convenienve is not a good idea.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[corky842]

Vista Second Edition

Re:Alternative names for it?

[a.d.trick]

I think "Trapdoor" is more accurate.

Re:Alternative names for it?

[6Yankee]

But if it's Vienna, WinCE^HWindows Mobile could be Viennetta...

*homerdrool*

Re:Alternative names for it?

[orkysoft]

They had that in an episode of Sliders (back before it started to suck).

Re:Alternative names for it?

[Mathness]

Windows Waterloo service pack 1 and 2: WWI and WWII

Re:Alternative names for it?

[wizzahd]

Yeah, there's the place "Vienna," but the first thing I thought was "...wait, so Microsoft's new OS is going to come in a can?"

Re:Alternative names for it?

[gig]

Windows Me Too ... whatever Steve Jobs can do Bill Gates can do better.

"Maybe its hypervisors"

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's a hypervisor that lets folk use your OS without it touching their hardware, putting anti-user technologies back under control of the user. Maybe that's how people wanted to run vista. So why is it prohibited to run low end versions under virtulization or hardware emulation? FWIW, all x86 cpus microcode the x86 instructions. They are all emulated hardware as prohibited by the EULA.

Re:"Maybe its hypervisors"

[mgiuca]

Exactly. Furthermore, Wikipedia defines Hypervisor as:

a hypervisor (also: virtual machine monitor) is a virtualization platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time. Why would MS want anybody running multiple OSes? They're trying their hardest to even prevent people from running XP (Vista Upgrade disabling XP keys).

Great, they know they've got a dud

[DrSkwid]

Another Windows in two years, why bother upgrading?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[thunrida]

Keep in mind this is MS - new version will be delayed and have all advanced features removed.

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[ZachPruckowski]

That doesn't really apply to Windows, for two reasons:

1) Every consumer "needs" to replace their computer every 2-3 years. They won't delay a computer purchase more than 6 months in order to get the next OS.
2) Corporate sales often involve site licenses with a guaranteed free update. So if you buy a 5 year plan now, you pay $ X per year, and you can run XP, Vista, or the new OS when it's out. So an upcoming new release is essentially a bonus for those companies. The usual Microsoft strategy involves over-hyping the next release to appeal precisely to that.
3) Business's update at IT's pace. That is, just because Vista came out now doesn't mean they'll start using it now. They'll move to Vista in 12-18 months, independent of when the successor comes out.

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[DoofusOfDeath]

1) Every consumer "needs" to replace their computer every 2-3 years. They won't delay a computer purchase more than 6 months in order to get the next OS.

I don't think this is true. 5+ years ago, I would have agreed. But now I'm content with the same computer for at least 4 years, maybe more. Maybe I've changed, maybe the market has:

• Now that I'm married with kids, I don't have as much time for computer gaming any more. Realistically, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, YouTube, RealPlayer, getting images off the digital camera, etc. just don't need a hardware upgrade. The only piece of software that lots of people use and that taxes modern hardware is Vista, and Vista is on almost no one's "must have" list.

• Another consequence of getting older and having kids is that you have more demanding things for your money: saving for retirement, college, mortgage, etc. So even on days when I'm jonesing for a new computer, I just learn to suck it up a little bit and accept the current one.

• After 10+ years of playing the twitchy, graphics-intensive games like FPS's, I'm bored. The only games that keep my interest are things like Civilization and Astral Masters, which have fairly low-end requirements.

• 5+ years ago, there was a very discernible improvement in performance every two years. Now? Not so much unless you're using things like FPS games which really tax the computer. In fact, I'd probably say that as the years go by, the fraction of apps that people want to use and that really tax the CPU is going down.

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[FallOfDay]

There is no point upgrading. XP's got support for the next six years, I'm in no great hurry for a 64-bit OS & DX10 is pointless until there's games support. Vista does have the distinct feeling of WindowsME about it. Another two year wait? No big deal, Vista got put off for that long, anyway & we all survived. Continued incremental hardware upgrades until XP dies a death, I feel.

Good article on the nVidia/Vista driver situation (also applies to MAudio)...
http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2007/02/10/not_enj oying_the_view/1.html

It'd be rough justice if Intel knocks nVidia out in the meantime & it's set for the same schedule as the next Windows release...
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 548

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[dalutong]

Yeah... I know what you mean. I'm still using Ubuntu Warty Warthog (4.10) because I never know when to upgrade! Every time they make a release they talk about how there will be another one in 6 months!

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[Franklin Brauner]

Another Windows in two years, why bother upgrading?

Because two years in Microsoft time = 8 years in real time.
--
Franklin

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[Buelldozer]

You made excellent points and it shows in your +5 rating. I'm in much the same position as you are and I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. This 4+ year old computer is still doing everything that it needs to do, so why spend the $$$ on buying a new one?

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[Phisbut]

Yeah... I know what you mean. I'm still using Ubuntu Warty Warthog (4.10) because I never know when to upgrade! Every time they make a release they talk about how there will be another one in 6 months!

Main difference here is, even if you would have upgraded to the new Ubuntu every 6 months, you wouldn't have shelled out hundreds of dollars every time.

Re:Great, they know they've got a dud

[gig]

If your XP box is working for you then it is better to get a Mac mini or an iPhone as an accessory for your XP box rather than paying money for Vista and then using it to destroy your XP box.

An XP box plus a Vista upgrade equals a computer that can't run iTunes, whereas an XP box plus Mac mini upgrade gives you two iTunes systems that represent the entire mainstream computing experience right now. When you compare what you can do with both an XP box and a Mac it is much more than Vista alone.

Mac mini is only $200 more than Windows Vista Ultimate and Mac mini includes the hardware and remote control. That is a lot more value than a Vista DVD and a weekend installing and limping along for a few months waiting on a handful of drivers. Ugh.

allow me to translate...

[timmarhy]

"Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it "

"we got nothing, someone think something up quick so we can steal it."

Re:allow me to translate...

[JamesTRexx]

I think it more like, "We got nothing, someone throw some meaningless buzzwords at the media!"

I mean, WTF is a "user interface paradigm" and "fundamental piece of enabling technology"? (apart from a powerswitch as guessed by JonathanR)

Re:allow me to translate...

[johnsmith_12345]

Don't worry, Leopard will be out soon.

"you're going to start hearing more and more"

[l3v1]

you're going to start hearing more and more

And you'd better going to start forgetting pretty fast too, since what you'll hear probably ain't going to be what you'll get. Or maybe it will. Or not. Well, after the last few years of windows feature hypes, it's hard to believe anything. That is, if you care to even bother.

Re:"you're going to start hearing more and more"

[aussie_a]

I think people can hope for the features they advertised in Longhorn to appear in the next Windows. They can at least hope.

Why announce now?

[GBC]

I have used Windows as my main OS for around 13 or 14 years, ever since boxing up my old Amiga (*sniff*). I am now pretty happy with XP, like I imagine most Windows customers are. I really like the look of Office 2007 and will probably end up buying it, but I don't need to upgrade to Vista to use it.

I just don't understand why they are announcing this new version so soon after the release of Vista. The reviews I have been reading about Vista already make me think twice about wanting to upgrade; now that I know they are bringing in another OS in a few years' time what is the incentive for a typical MS customer like me to upgrade? Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.

For those that do want to upgrade there is already a built-in lag before doing so anyway (at least for the sensible ones), either because they need to buy new hardware or because they will not install a new OS without some of the early bugs being ironed out and a service pack being released.

If we assume that MS actually delivers this new OS on time (which is a big if) there is not that long a wait between the time after lag for people to upgrade to Vista and the time this is released. Won't this reduce uptake on Vista? After all, if we are already happy with XP, why not wait?

Anyone already using Vista care to comment?

Re:Why announce now?

[jcr]

I just don't understand why they are announcing this new version so soon after the release of Vista.

Mainly because everyone knows what a disappointment Vista turned out to be, and to retain customers they have to pretend that something better is less than five years away.

2007 will be remembered as the peak of Microsoft. They have nothing but a long decline ahead of them.

-jcr

Re:Why announce now?

[omicronish]

I just don't understand why they are announcing this new version so soon after the release of Vista.

What do you expect the developers to do in the meantime? Just sit around and wait until customers start demanding a new version before working on it? Whether they announce it or not, they're going to work on the next version. It'd be silly to just sit still.

Re:Why announce now?

[Macthorpe]

Come now, predictions of Microsoft's demise are so... mid to late 90s!

Re:Why announce now?

[ZachPruckowski]

I've been "using Vista" for 2 years via Tiger and Ubuntu, and I participated in the RC1 testing.

The simple answer is that Windows buyers fall into 4 groups:
1) Upgrade whenever IT feels like it.
2) Early adopters, bought Vista already.
3) Slow upgraders - will buy Vista in a year or so (when SP1 or whatever comes out)
4) Gets Vista with the regularly scheduled new computer.

Groups 1 and 4 are unaffected by Windows scheduling - they'll buy based on non-MS factors. Group 2 will likely buy any version of Windows early (either because they have to for their job [like developers], or because they're enthusiasts). By 2009, Group 3 will largely be on Vista anyways. Unless you bought a computer in Q2 2006 or later, the way processors are moving now, you'll be obsolete in 2009*. Not to mention that groups 2 and 3 are utterly dwarfed in size by groups 1 & 4. Therefore, 90% of MS sales are independent of how often they release their software.

* = note that this is accelerated by Vista. If everyone must have very high requirements to run Vista, then developers can soon start targeting more powerful computers.

Re:Why announce now?

[ocbwilg]

If we assume that MS actually delivers this new OS on time (which is a big if) there is not that long a wait between the time after lag for people to upgrade to Vista and the time this is released. Won't this reduce uptake on Vista? After all, if we are already happy with XP, why not wait?

This isn't an announcement. Someone just mentioned that yes, they have already started work on their next big OS upgrade project. But they can't even tell you what the new feature set is likely to include, so it's pretty clear that they're only at the drawing board stage. There is nothing unusual about this at all. Many software products have long development cycles. Even a fairly straightforward PC-based video game can easily take two years in development. An entirely new OS will likely take significantly longer. The reality is, if they want to ship a new version of Windows in the next five years, they need to start work now.

Some interesting comments from the article though, they indicated that they would have shipped Vista in 2.5 years if they hadn't stopped work on Vista to focus on XP security updates. But they didn't mention anywhere that after they got the XP security updates fairly well in hand, they basically ditched the Vista code and started over almost from scratch. That was a fairly long delay. And those sorts of unanticipated events could certainly push this 2.5 year timeline out considerably as well. If "Vienna" (just a code name for now) is going to be a revolutionary new product, I would guess that it's more like 4 years out at the minimum.

I honestly think that what would help Microsoft more is if they didn't focus on releasing huge new, completely revamped operating systems every few years and instead focused on providing updates to the current products. With Windows 95 there was the original release, then OSR2. Then Windows 98 came along, and the Windows 98 SE. The various Linux distros usually offer incremental (and often modular) improvements in subsequent versions. I think that Apple does something similar. IMHO, as long as you have a relatively stable foundation (which Vista is supposed to be) there shouldn't be a need to do a major ground-up rewriting of the OS.

I know that when WinFS was pulled from Vista that MS indicated that it would be released later as an update to Vista. Why can't they manage this with other changes/new functionality? I mean, the obvious answer is they want to sell new software to people, but they could just as easily offer consumers (businesses already have it) a subscription similar to OneCare that allowed them to get the latest updates of Windows. Of course, probably 95% of operating systems sold are OEM bundled with new PCs, so even the subscription model wouldn't have to apply to too many uses. I doubt that MS would lose much, if any, in sales by going with such a model. And they would be able to roll out technology updates more quickly.

Re:Why announce now?

[Ash-Fox]

What do you expect the developers to do in the meantime?

Fix Vista.

Re:Why announce now?

[Darundal]

Perhaps to keep some interest in the stock, since Vista probably isn't and XP probably isn't either.

Re:Why announce now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly because everyone knows what a disappointment Vista turned out to be

I think it's a bit soon to declare that. I've been running it since early December, as a developer, and am far more satisfied with it than I ever was with XP.

Perhaps more representative of the population, I showed it to my girlfriend and she loved it. She's the average computer user, and it runs perfectly smoothly on her year-old laptop (including Aero and iTunes).

Perhaps even more representative of the population, the cleaning woman for our building ordered a new desktop from HP at 6AM the day they started preloading Vista (with 2 gigs of RAM and flat panel) for a total of $800. She's psyched.

Re:Why announce now?

[jonasj]

They are not announcing it now. They announced this before there was a Windows XP!

After they had Windows 2000 and Windows ME out the door, a bunch of people from Microsoft went to the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort in Canada to plan the next two versions of Windows. They named them after the mountains. Whistler was basically a project to slap the user interface from Windows ME onto Windows 2000 and turn 2000 into something they could ship a Home Edition of. Whistler was to ship in 2001, which it did, as Windows XP.

The next version, Blackcomb, was supposed to totally revolutionize everything and ship in 2005. That is what they are today calling Windows "Vienna".

And in between, they planned an project called Longhorn (after a bar at the ski resort) which was to be a small upgrade of Whistler, like Win98SE was to Win98. That is what they just shipped, as Vista, 4 years after the planned release date in 2003.

Meanwhile, I'm using various GNU-based operating systems and am happier than ever.

Re:Why announce now?

[BronsCon]

Won't this reduce uptake on Vista?

I think that's the point. It's out now, it's too late to take it back.
Well, it's not too late, they could recall it. That would be extremely damaging to Windows as a franchise.

Releasing Vienna so soon after Vista will also be damaging. However, it will; only damage Vista, rather than Windows as a whole. Not releasing it ASAP and encouraging people to use Vista would likely do more damage than this, though less damage than recalling Vista.

That's why they're playing their cards this way. Let people use Vista and watch Windows spiral down. Recall Vista and let Windows spiral down. They need a way to stop Vista without people knowing they're stopping Vista; this is it.

Re:Why announce now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone already using Vista care to comment?

I am using Vista Home Premium and really like it. Not sure why all the negativity. It's understandable that with the release of a new OS there will invariably be hardware and software issues. Especially the huge amounts of hardware and software available for Windows. In a year most of these issues will be resolved and most of the nay sayers proven wrong.

Re:Why announce now?

[omicronish]

Fix Vista.

As I've written in another post, another team does the fixing and maintaining.

Re:Why announce now?

[jcr]

I've been running it since early December, as a developer, and am far more satisfied with it than I ever was with XP.

Now that's what I'd call damning with faint praise.

-jcr

Re:Why announce now?

[Tim C]

Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.

You can say exactly the same thing about hardware though; the net effect is that you'll never upgrade.

Upgrade when it's right for you to upgrade. If Vista has a feature that you are willing to pay for, or some must-have piece of software is Vista-only, then upgrade. If not, don't.

Besides, how far did Vista's release slip? What makes you think the next release will be on time?

Re:Why announce now?

[angulion]

I would rather say that the peak of Microsoft was at end of 1999.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=MSFT

Re:Why announce now?

[jcr]

Peak of their market capitalization, sure. It wasn't the peak of their revenues or their market share, though. At any rate, they're on the downslope now.

-jcr

Re:Why announce now?

[gig]

> Come now, predictions of Microsoft's demise are so... mid to late 90s!

Yes, here in the 21st century we are actually witnessing the demise.

Re:Why announce now?

[gig]

> I honestly think that what would help Microsoft more is if they didn't focus on releasing huge new, completely revamped
> operating systems every few years and instead focused on providing updates to the current products.

That is what they are doing. There aren't any new features in Vista.

Last year when Apple released a beta of Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5 due later this Spring) they gave developers a feature called Time Machine that is the kind of feature that users pay for a retail box upgrade to get. I already know I will buy Leopard for the Time Machine feature. When Leopard ships, Mac users will be able to buy a Leopard box and a typical USB or FireWire hard disk, and that is a complete backup solution for Mac OS X that anyone can use. You have to see it in action to understand. It's versioning made easy and automated backup made easy and both file and disk restores made easy. It's the exact software you would want right now to take advantage of a 500 GB USB disk for $150. That is just one feature of Leopard, and they already said they are holding the best features secret until launch. And it will be very easy to upgrade your Mac yourself. It always takes 20 minutes and works great.

Over in Vista they have done a lot of renaming stuff and moving it around and their improvements to their display layer software are really behind and have ridiculous hardware requirements and they added even more DRM and it can turn itself off now at Microsoft's request and there isn't anything that you can say is going to change the way you use a computer.

They have not been following software design principles. They don't iterate on their own stuff to take advantage of what they built previously because what they built previously is all crap, and all in one big ball that they're afraid to untangle in some cases. And the worms, that is awful.

Re:Why announce now?

[gig]

>> Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.

If you want to see what Microsoft will come up with next, say around 2010, history tells us you can go here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050731002116/www.appl e.com/macosx/

Re:Why announce now?

[Macthorpe]

I'll bite.

Can you prove that with some figures? Last time I checked revenue was on the increase.

Going back to fundamentals...

[Todamont]

Would mean ripping of Xerox again? Anyhow, I want a holographic display.

This just in...

[Zouden]

Company developing new product!

Is anyone surprised by this? I bet people at Apple are already working on the successor to Leopard, which isn't even out yet. This is the way things are done.

Re:This just in...

[JohnnyCanuck]

Yes but this just highlights the fundamental difference between MS and Apple.

When Apple announced something or shows something, its practically damn done. When Steve gets up on stage and says "oh, and just one more thing..." you are pretty much going to be able to buy the stuff that day or in a couple months when Steve promised. The hype starts then and there. Steve said leopard would ship march 07 at WWDC. The mill says its comming march.

Microsoft? those assholes show off the product well before is ever done and by the time you get it, its not anything like the original. They jsut cant help themselves trying to tell us how cool they are (we all know they seriously are not...). A year ago when they announced the drop dead date for Vista and all the things cut out we already knew this release was going to be a turd. there was no suprise, no "Wow" left in the Vist "Wow" campaign because it had already been overhyped to the nth degree.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are what we call in the real world a 'very bitter nerd'.
Most people do not care for any of what you said and the business world needs a heads up unlike Apple who have no major influence over business.

It has only been overhyped toward the nerds/power-users and where the real market/sales are those people don't give two shits what you have to say.

Heres a fundamental difference; Apple was a failing company and MS bailed them out. Seriously fuck Apple and I think MS should stop producing Office for it to see how well they really do.
Cold hard truth...

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to be another hyper-aggressive little nerd, who needs a bit of humility.

Pay again?

[Tribbin]

Do Windows users have to pay for the upgrade to the 'new windows' by that time?

Just curious.

Re:Pay again?

[aussie_a]

People still have to pay? Wow, I thought Microsoft stopped doing that back in 1998. At least, that's the last time -I- paid.

Unknown features

[Pascal Sartoretti]

Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ...

Of course. They need OS X 10.5's features to be announced first.

Re:Unknown features

[MemoryDragon]

They usually wait for OSX or linux showing it, than they have to wait for the working linux implementation and about one year after the technology has been in the opensource they announce it for their next Windows as something they invented :-)

Re:Unknown features

[DogDude]

They need OS X 10.5's features to be announced first.

I just hope they don't copy OSX's "overpriced hardware lock-in feature" or OSX's "random instability feature".

Re:already hard at work eh?

[omicronish]

how is that possible? Vista hasn't even really hit the market yet... outside of some large businesses and anone who bought a computer recently, no one has it...

Vista RTM'd back in November 2006, and was available to TechNet subscribers and businesses later that month. After finishing coding it's not like the devs are tasked with running Vista marketing, getting the CDs pressed, and scurrying out into the world like little ants to spread Vista. No, they instead do developer work, like planning and coding for their next project. (And if you're wondering who does patches and service packs, it's a different team.)

What spec will that need??

[10bellies]

Most computers now are going to struggle to run the bloated POS that is Vista, even the so called 'Vista Ready' models currently being touted.. What the hell sort of Spec will be required for the next MS OS?

Re:What spec will that need??

[aussie_a]

Actually that's all part of Microsoft's plan. Release a buggy as hell OS in 2009 that doesn't actually run on any current hardware. Get people to buy it then 2 years later when the hardware to run it is finally put on the market, release a patch that fixes the piece of shit they published in 2009. That way they get money in 2009 for a product that won't be ready until at least 2011.

Re:What spec will that need??

[BrokenHalo]

Sounds a bit like Windows 95, which almost everybody despised, being closely followed by Windows 98, which everybody seems to have hated. Followed by 2000 (somewhat less hated) and XP which is only loathed.

Maybe in 2 years time they'll come up with something people only dislike... ;-)

Re:What spec will that need??

[10bellies]

Still waiting for the ME patch...

Re:What spec will that need??

[10bellies]

98SE wasn't too bad, and certainly better than XP before SP2.

Re:What spec will that need??

[ZachPruckowski]

The requirements would sound very high-end now, but likely will be just mid-range when it comes out in 2009. If I said the requirements for a decent run were a 2.4 GHz+ quad-core chip with 2-3 GB of RAM and 512MB VRAM, you'd cry, but the fact is that that'll be mid-range in 2009 (quad core is ultra-high-end now, high-end in late 2007, mid-range in 2008, halfway expected in 2009), just like dual core was premium in 2005, and is now pretty much mid-range to upper-mid-range.

Re:What spec will that need??

[10bellies]

But that's pretty much what you'd need to run Vista with all the bells and whistles..

Re:What spec will that need??

[Ash-Fox]

The patch is called Windows XP.

Re:What spec will that need??

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a machine doesn't exist yet.

Imagine something like a Beowulf cluster of WGA-validated Vista machines.

Re:What spec will that need??

[drsmithy]

Most computers now are going to struggle to run the bloated POS that is Vista, even the so called 'Vista Ready' models currently being touted.. What the hell sort of Spec will be required for the next MS OS?

Vista runs reasonably on machines ~5 years old and usably on machines ~7 years old, maybe requiring minor, cheap upgrades.

This has been a pattern repeated throughout Windows releases for, well, pretty much forever (with the possible exceptions of Windows 95). It's a safe bet the next release will be the same.

Re:What spec will that need??

[cnettel]

Mmm, 16-bit GDI and USER are really nice. Really. And FAT32 is reliable.

I'm sorry but our intelligence says otherwise...

[gd23ka]

The upcoming version of Windows is codenamed "East Berlin".

MS promising too much too early

[Aminion]

the next Windows iteration will be coming a brief two and a half years after Vista's launch.

Is this another impossible deadline by MS? Or maybe this will be a service pack and not a major WIndows update? Anyways, 2.5 is too early for the next version of Windows when Vista will probably take 1-2 years before the major shortcomings are fixed.

Re:already hard at work eh?

[Stevecrox]

I'm not so sure of that, vista adoption has been faster than Windows 2000 adoption in american business ( http://news.com.com/Report+Vistas+business+sales+s tronger+than+expected/2100-1016_3-6149468.html ) to be honest thats going to drive sales. Most people I know like things to be the same, My pa uses outlook 2002 in work and refuses to upgrade to 2003, I can name several other family/friends who use a set OS/Office apps in work and so use the exact same ones at home (sometimes newer if the UI isn't much different.)

Vista's adoption rate has surprised me, only two other tech savy people I know have got it and yet the store in which I work is filled with new upgraders, a online group I'm part of has formed a vista discussion group and even a few of my university mates have also made the plunge. To be honest its worrying, I upgraded because I found one or two features useful and got too used to ribbons (from running the beta of Office) many people have upgraded because the people on the news have been going on about how wonderfuull Vista is.

I was doubtful that Microsoft would get 100 million copies of Vista out the door by the end of the year, but am not so sure now. BTW does anyone have and idea of the number of activations of Vista so far?

New think

[GreatDrok]

Hmmm, abject failure to deliver on Longhorn and the fact that two years in they had to dump it because it wasn't going to work and do a simple retread of Windows 2003 with a bit of flashy OS X ripped off graphics is how I remember it. Blaming XP SP2 is simply trying to change history. They made all these great claims about how wonderful Longhorn was going to be and now they are claiming that Apple has copied all their great ideas and delivered them in a working OS while they have dropped most of them because they couldn't make it work. But Apple could. And Apple is the one doing to copying.

How about this for a prediction. The next version of Windows will be late, more of the same, still insecure and a desperate copy of whatever Apple was shipping in 2007.

Re:New think

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Hmmm, abject failure to deliver on Longhorn and the fact that two years in they had to dump it because it wasn't going to work

Who the hell, other than Microsoft, cares that Vista is late? No one. The Vista development "reboot" was the best choice that Microsoft ever made - I used many, many pre-reboot Longhorn builds, and, let me tell you, they weren't pretty.

and do a simple retread of Windows 2003 with a bit of flashy OS X ripped off graphics is how I remember it

This is just blatantly wrong for so many reasons. You may not find value in the new features in Vista, but the list is neither short nor insubstantial. Apple adds search, widgets, some API improvements, and ships Tiger, which is welcomed as a big upgrade. Microsoft adds search, gadgets, multiple new APIs, major kernel changes, entirely new driver systems (audio, USB, video), tons of new security features (UAC, Defender, etc.), a whole new installation system, speech recognition, and hundreds of other features, and suddenly it's a "retread of Windows 2003".

Anyone who says Vista is just a rehash of XP obviously hasn't actually used it for more than 10 minutes. I direct them to glance at the Wikipedia article. You can claim that you don't care about UAC, Transactional NTFS, WPF, XPS, WDDM, CardSpace, SideShow, ReadyDrive/ReadyBoost, the new networking stack, or new color managment, but you can't claim that they aren't major new features that will have a lot of impact for some people.

Re:New think

[gig]

> Apple adds search, widgets, some API improvements, and ships Tiger, which is welcomed as a big upgrade.
> Microsoft adds search, gadgets, multiple new APIs, major kernel changes, entirely new driver systems (audio, USB, video),
> tons of new security features (UAC, Defender, etc.), a whole new installation system, speech recognition, and hundreds
> of other features, and suddenly it's a "retread of Windows 2003".

One new feature of Tiger that you forgot to mention is Intel compatibility, both x32 and x64, single and multiple cores, with all the same features as the PowerPC version except the Classic environment is replaced by Rosetta doing basically the same thing. As far as under-the-hood changes, I think Apple has Microsoft beat there. All previous versions of Mac OS X ran on PowerPC only.

Apple's major system releases all feature a 50/50 split of under-the-hood stuff and in-your-face lickable user features. You don't have to tell a graphic designer about the kernel to get him to be excited about a new system release from Apple. There will be something font or graphics-related that will do that. There are a lot of features that don't have equivalents on other platforms, like the pro audio subsystem or the ridiculously sophisticated typography.

Huge Mistake

[bogie]

To be talking about this now. If this story gains traction then it will just hurt business adoption. Two years is nothing to wait out Vista and XP still works fine. Many small businesses I've personally heard from have not heard great things about Vista, this will scare them off even more. To take a page from Huggy Bear word on the street is...Vista is OK, nothing special and not worth upgrading to. News of Vista's early replacement certainly isn't the method I'd use to try and win people over.

Re:Huge Mistake

[Dunbal]

News of Vista's early replacement certainly isn't the method I'd use to try and win people over.


      No no! You don't understand! See, the sooner they can get the next OS out, the faster they can drop support for XP because after all, it's 2 versions behind and "obsolete". Now you're forced to upgrade. See? ;)

Re:Huge Mistake

[Tom]

I doubt anything at MS happens by chance. So this leak isn't and while it might hurt Vista adoption a little, it's probably just enough in the future to not change decisions about today and this year. However, it just might keep people on the windos platform, because they have something besides the trainwreck Vista to look forward to now.

I say this is a marketing move to prevent people looking at Vista with disgust and deciding to jump ship to something else entirely (OSX, Linux, Solaris, whatever).

Re:Huge Mistake

[orin]

Why is a comment from someone who hasn't even used the operating system themselves marked insightful? He's basically said "I've heard that a bunch of dudes that haven't used Vista haven't heard great things about it". Perhaps insightful of the bunch of dudes had trialled Vista. But I heard from someone that heard isn't really all that insightful is it?

Re:Huge Mistake

[glwtta]

Why is a comment from someone who hasn't even used the operating system themselves marked insightful?

Because he's talking about the perception of Vista among potential users, not its technical merits? Just a thought.

Re:Huge Mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does XP work fine, but so does Windows 2000. I am still using that OS on my personal computer (XP at work), and do not plan to upgrade anytime soon.

Re:first post

[JonathanR]

I think you've got some network latency problems there.

In English?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers."

maybe it's a new version of the English fucking language.

Move along, nothing to see hear

[Arimus]

WTF is this a story? Company launches product and starts work on next product. No shit sherlock.... I would suspect that while the new OS moves from the blue-sky phase to getting actual code cut the R&D dept will be work on its replacement....

Manpower doesn't scale

[gilesjuk]

The more people you put on a project the more managers you require, the more meetings, the more decisions, more designs etc...

Larger code base means more bugs, more test time, more bug fixing teams etc..

You can't put twice as many people at a project and expect twice the work to result from it.

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

microsoft reps often cited WinXP problems as reasons why vista was delayed.

What the poster is wondering is why not get more poeple to fix WinXP and more people to work on Vista?

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[donaldm]

Design by committee means more features that no one actually needs or even wants except for that one person we like to keep locked in his room because he might scare the neighbours.

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[sgtrock]

The Economic Impact of Open Source Software and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, pages 48-53. The best counter argument to the standard closed source development model that I've ever read.

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[x-caiver]

One of the problems with people saying 'hire more people' is they only look at it as a single number (I'm not saying you didn't realize this, but I see it often) - hire 5 people on to a 5 person team and you are twice as fast. That's not how it works, hiring more people only solves certain types of problems. For complex systems (software applications, operating systems, hardware, whatever) there is considerable ramp-up time for new hires. There are only so many people that have experience working on the system, and while general 'computer science' or 'electrical engineering' knowledge is a necessary tool, it isn't the only thing necessary to contribute to a project.

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[jacobsm]

Fred Brooks stated this very same statement back in his 1975 book "The Mythical Man-Month"

Assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule will make it even later, due to the time required for the new programmers to learn about the project, as well as the increased communication overhead. When N people have to communicate among themselves (without a hierarchy), as N increases, their output M decreases and can even become negative (i.e. the total work remaining at the end of a day is greater than the total work that had been remaining at the beginning of that day, such as when many bugs are created).

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[dcam]

That was a load of crap. The reason Vista was late was because Microsoft screwed up.

Re:Manpower doesn't scale

[gig]

The Microsoft stuff is not architected in a modular way. Bill Gates said recently a major feature of Vista is "layers" which will enable them to update some components in isolation from others.

A prophecy from the 1980's courtesy Ultravox

[Anonymous Coward]

We walked in the cold air.
Freezing breath on a window pane,
Lying and waiting.
The man in the dark in a picture frame,
So mystic and soulful.
A voice reaching out in a piercing cry,
It stays with you until

The feeling has gone only you and I.
It means nothing to me.
This means nothing to me.
Oh Vienna

I suggest...

[deathstar778]

Windows Nukem Forever.

That I'm sure of.

[LuckyStarr]

"But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Yeah. More vaporware for the sheep to salivate over.

My guess: To be released 2014.

Double Take

[wjcofkc]

At first I thought that read, "Vista Foul-up Already in the Works".

Of course it's in the works!

[phillymjs]

They've probably been fleshing out the feature list for Vista's successor since the first day a developer copy of OS X 10.5 reached the grubby mitts of a Microsoft employee. Don't expect the real work to start until spring, though, when it's released with its 'top secret' features.

Go ahead and mod me down, bitches, but after this tasty tidbit you know I'm probably right. And they did the same thing to Go Corp, BTW.

~Philly

Re:Of course it's in the works!

[DogDude]

You mean, Microsoft pays close attention to their competition?!?! What will they think of next? I bet they're going to sell their software in a CD format... JUST LIKE THE COMPETITION! Those evil, evil, evil M$ people. ;)

Re:Of course it's in the works!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, Microsoft pays close attention to their competition

No, he means that Microsoft was caught using an OSX developer pre-release for inspiration for their user interface and other features while claiming that Apple had ripped those ideas off of them.

It's one thing to send a secret shopper over to buy a competitor's product, take it apart, and use what you can. It's another to do so and then openly lie about it.

Re:Of course it's in the works!

[MojoStan]

They've probably been fleshing out the feature list for Vista's successor since the first day a developer copy of OS X 10.5 reached the grubby mitts of a Microsoft employee. Don't expect the real work to start until spring, though, when it's released with its 'top secret' features.

Go ahead and mod me down, bitches, but after this tasty tidbit you know I'm probably right.

Are you (and the moderators) suggesting that those internal Microsoft e-mails prove that MS "copied" those features from Apple's early demo of OS X Tiger in 2004? Re-read that article without your anti-MS goggles.

Desktop search, video conferencing, sidebar, and Aero were Longhorn/Vista features that were announced by MS long before that impressive Tiger preview at WWDC. Those e-mails show that MS was very impressed by Apple's implementation of already-planned Vista features, not that they were copying them. Since Apple would release Tiger (with these features) before MS could release their long-delayed Vista, Vista's implementations would be directly compared (by reviewer/consumers) to Tiger's implementations.

"Longhorn" Alpha Preview (November 2002)

Except for perhaps Aqua/Aero, none of these features were "copied" from Apple the way Apple fanboys like to claim. At most, they can argue that MS changed their existing implementations of those features to resemble Apple's implementations, but they didn't copy the features themselves.

Re:Of course it's in the works!

[gig]

Mac OS X came out in March, 2001, huh? It's not recent. It predates Windows XP by six months, and Apple shipped about 10 unique versions before your Longhorn Alpha Preview (whatever that is) was available in November 2002. At that time Apple was hard at work getting ready to SHIP Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, with the GUI done entirely in OpenGL, and Microsoft's MacBU was running betas of it so they could develop MS Office Mac for it.

Further, instant desktop search was a feature of Mac OS 9, which is about 1999 and predates Mac OS X. Every day since then I have asked a Mac for a file and get it back instantly. Get your information straight at least. Find a Panther system and go to the Finder and choose File > Find and type a word and BOOM.

What happened with search in Tiger was they made the index real-time ... it is created by the kernel with each file write so it is always up-to-date, rather than being updated in the background overnight, and they continued to add features consistent with a new iteration of an existing software. And they added a "search" system menu to go with the one for scripts and Wi-Fi and displays and such, and they gave it a new name: Spotlight. However it isn't that on previous Mac OS X before Tiger you couldn't do an instant search.

The Most Important Feature...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

"We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Oh come on, with a name like Vienna we all know the only major upgrade will be more DRM.
MS and Hollywood want to lock us all up in a tiny little can of DRM control, just like a bunch of Vienna sausages.

It's the 'Russian Education Edition'

[photomic]

featuring Bob, of course, or "Smilin' Ivan" as he's known in Soviet Russia.

Translation...

[d0n quix0te]

We are waiting for Apple to ship Leopard, iLife/iWork 07 and show off the top secret features. 2.5 years should give us enough time to come up with a half baked version of Leopard.

"It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Of course you will start hearing more and more after Steve shows his hand ;-)

Re:I'm sorry but our intelligence says otherwise..

[WrongSizeGlass]

Wouldn't "Atlantis" be more appropriate?

Alternate Translation

[Mateo_LeFou]

"Just don't switch to something else. Longh^H^H^H^H^H Vienna is going to blow you away, seriously."

Re:first post

[DarkOx]

or maybe he layency is so good he was able to post after reading your reply and still have it hit slashdot before yours did.

Total Information Technology

[cp.tar]

... or TIT.

And while you suck on the TIT, we have you by the motherboard.

That was in Robin Williams's stand-up in 2000, IIRC...

Re:Total Information Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

The Robin Williams stand-up comedy is from 2002. Highly funny and refreshingly politically incorrect.

Maybe....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers...." Maybe its the linux kernel....

East Berlin's bright future

[mbaudis]

And then East Berlin is than integrated into the West, and being made capital, again? Jobs instead of Kohl? and Ballmer instead of Honecker? Maybe a bright future, indeed! Also, Allchin (with his love for Macs) as Gorbachev replacement - not quite the format, though.

What about blackcomb?

[ZZfoxELITE]

What happened to blackcomb? IIRC it was in development before longhorn, and was gonna be released after it. Is Vienna the same project?

Re:What about blackcomb?

[AIFEX]

According to, the ever so reliable, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_%22Vienna%22 ), Blackcomb was set to replace XP. For whatever reasons, Vista has become the intermediary between XP and Blackcomb. Whilst Vista is set to change the way users interact with the OS via the GUI, Blackcomb is set to change the way users interact with their machines at a hardware level ( hence the comment on Hypervisiors I imagine) - according to WIKI.

Re:What about blackcomb?

[jonasj]

Yes, they just renamed it since blackcomb was supposed to ship in 2005, so it started to get embarrassing for them...

In Soviet wherever...

[Bucc5062]

In Soviet Russia, Ivan smiles at you!
(I'm so sorry, it's early Saturday morning, can't control all brain functions)

Hooray

[Zeroblitzt]

Woohoo, another Microsoft product I won't use, in exchange for something free.

Same old broke warez

[Nichole_knc]

Until Microsoft gets off their "stupid" backwards compatibility hang up Windows will always be bloated and "swiss cheese" (no offense intended against the Swiss). Why would someone wish to run an 8 or 16 bit program from 17 years ago on a machine and OS that did not exist at that time is beyond me... I have stated this before and drew flame for it... Some lamer complained that they could not "afford" another computer to have a second OS to run old stuff on. I have more than 15 computers out of those I only bought and paid for 3 (three) all the rest are off the side of the street or dumpsters. They all are bootable at least to one OS. Most are multi-boot win98/Linux. They range from a Pentium 200 up to P4 3.0 even a couple of dual xeons (yep trash out of a dumpster complete with a 64 bit Win XP, CAD/CAM loaded also with the latest Office..OUT OF A DUMPSTER) It ain't hard to have more that one machine and very many OSs... If it is still an issue see vmware..... Windows will be broke till they do a "redo" form scratch...

Re:Same old broke warez

[Ash-Fox]

Wait? Vista is backwards compatible? I can't even get my games working on it!

Re:Same old broke warez

[MemoryDragon]

Actually that is what vms and emulations are for, it would be easy to shift the entire old part of windows into a vm, but the main problem is, the apis are so entangled in each other that even microsoft does not have a clue probably if you pull an 8 or 16 bit dll out of windows if you do not crash the entire system!

Re:Same old broke warez

[tepples]

Why would someone wish to run an 8 or 16 bit program from 17 years ago on a machine and OS that did not exist at that time is beyond me

Because their old C=64 is broken, or their old IBM PC is broken, and replacements are no longer manufactured.

Re:Same old broke warez

[Nasarius]

But you can still type c:\progra~1 into Explorer.

Backwards compatibility is a Good Thing, but it should be compartmentalized. Use an emulator like DOSBox for DOS apps, and tear out all the old ugly FAT16 compatibility hacks from the OS. Add real, elegantly simple DLL versioning like Unix has had for decades, not the half-assed messy attempt at it they have now.

Re:Same old broke warez

[Nichole_knc]

You ever heard of E-bay??? or Google???? Soldering irons work too and parts a plenty... :)

Re:Same old broke warez

[gig]

> Windows will be broke till they do a "redo" form scratch...

Windows 2000 was Windows v5.0 and it was advertised as a complete rewrite of Windows to get it off of DOS (4.0 and 4.1 were both on DOS) and into the future. However it was not ready for home users until Windows v5.1 aka XP. That is your rewrite, though. When Microsoft announced the name "Windows XP" I remember being very disappointed because Apple's much-talked-about rewrite of Mac OS had been named Mac OS X in 1999 (two years before) and now that Microsoft's much-talked-about rewrite of Windows was ready they added an X to it also, albeit with a P. Then it turned out that they ported DOS security to NT and shipped it out onto the Internet with the firewall missing or off and it got worms and everybody forgot how this was the rewrite that was supposed to be the foundation for the world of tomorrow.

The only viable Windows rewrite I have seen so far would be a Linux-based system. I've been using Mac OS X these past 5 years and there were many times when Apple seemed to do something magic and it turned out that it was even possible only because of all the open source stuff they use. It benefits Apple for the speed and quality of development, but it also benefits the users directly for example I appreciate that Apache and PHP are part of the Mac OS because I use them every day along with Photoshop and BBEdit and QuickTime and other traditional Mac tools.

Re:Same old broke warez

[gig]

> Actually that is what vms and emulations are for, it would be easy to shift the entire old part of windows into a vm,
> but the main problem is, the apis are so entangled in each other that even microsoft does not have a clue probably
> if you pull an 8 or 16 bit dll out of windows if you do not crash the entire system!

That is how Apple got their users off of "Classic" Mac OS and onto Mac OS X. It took about two years to dump the virtual machine and most Mac users don't even realize they have it now. It isn't part of the Intel version and isn't missed.

translation

[oohshiny]

It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more

In different words: we have nothing to talk about, but our PR machinery just isn't gonna shut up anyway. Or: business as usual.

haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

It aint't gonna be 2009, that's all you can depend on. This is the USUAL MS FUD, yes, FUD. Tag (beta) it, FUD.

grrrr

[Danzigism]

so i've been using the official released version of Vista on my computer at work the past few days to no avail.. i spent a long time learning all the little quirks, and I finally got the hang of where certain things are.. i pretty much wasted a lot of time.. The Desktop Manager constantly crashes on me.. Whether Aero is running or not, as soon as the computer boots in to Windows, give it about 3 minutes before the Desktop Manager Crashes.. Then, give it about another 15 minutes, and it bluescreens completely.. Something about a driver_irqd... i figured it was my 7600GT card, so I uninstalled the driver, and used Windows' default driver which eventually produced the same results.. So I just took the damn card out and used my onboard video.. Whaddya know? Still bluescreens.. After 2 days of fucking with it, I formatted and put XP Pro back on.. They got a long fucking way to go before I can start using this practically in my work environment.. Why even release something so damn buggy? Its like Windows 95 all over again!

but i will say, that once all the bullshit is worked out, it'll be one damn nice OS..

Re:grrrr

[Stevecrox]

I had this exact same problem on a

Abit NF95
AMD64 3700+
BFG 7600 GS OC 25mb
Creative Audigy SE 7.1
2gb Cosair Value DDR ram

I tried everything but Vista would hang on the install almost every time and the few times it installed I had the exact same errors you've listed. as far as I can make out it was the ram/chipset driver, unplugging one of my ram sticks (leaving 1gb) allowed Vista to install properly. Using anouther motherboard and all the other same components on a Asus A8n-SLi Deluxe motherboard (Nforce 4 chipset)and it installed fine. Trying the same components on anouther nforce 410/430 chipset board (a DFI Lan Party) caused the exact same error.

The really weird thing is now Vista is installed I can put the second 1gb stick in my Abit Nf95 and don't suffer the issues you mention. Since its only happened on one chipset and two boards which support a maximum of 2gb DDR ram I'm assuming the installer is seeing somethign different and going wrong when it configures Vista.

In short if you have 2gb of ram and a Nforce 410/430 chipset try removing a 1gb stick and installing again, then once its installed replace the 1gb stick.

Name change

[HangingChad]

They should call the next version of Windows "Apology" and make it actually worth the money.

Not the last then

[AIFEX]

I heard news of Vienna a couple of weeks ago and I find it interesting that Vista is touted, even by Gates himself, as the last installment of Windows. Future platforms to be mere Internet upgraded editions of Vista. Perhaps Vienna is the new name for a big Vista SP1.

vaporware

[Tom]

One, this is 100% vaporware, if even the MS insiders have no clue about the central changes.

Two, any bets that over the next months, especially around the launch of OSX Leopard, we'll be hearing "leaked" info about all the really cool and advanced stuff that's going to be in Longhorn SP2, err... "Vienna" ? Then, of course, when it ships in 20012, none of them will actually be there. History repeats itself...

Re:vaporware

[LittleDobbs]

Just like Cario right. Release a product and when people start complaining start talking about the greatest new thing. This keeps would be switchers from switching. MS has been doing this for 10 years now. Yes history always repeats.

Re:vaporware

[kbielefe]

MS has been doing this for 10 years now.

I knew there was a reason I switched 10 years ago.

Fiji?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to Fiji being the next codename for a windows release?

Re:Fiji?

[Nanpa]

Well, Microsoft gets torn apart enough for antitrust, do you think they want to be blamed for a coup as well?

Perhaps they took a quote from Ultravox ?

[Salsaman]

This means nothing to me
Oh Vienna

Early 2009?

[0123456]

So just when users have got around to switching to Vista, they're going to release yet another operating system? Are they planning on instigating a biannual Microsoft Tax now?

$400 is a lot of money to pay for a service pack.

It's A Bit Like "Mr Purple Rain" Prince...

[pandrijeczko]

Windows Vienna - the OS formerly known as "Service Pack".

Wait. What?

[superdan2k]

"... and we may see it as early as 2009."

Did Microsoft get their hands on a time machine?

Where Do I Line Up?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more.

Well I'm certainly sold on it. Sounds like just what I've been waiting for. Here's a large deposit, now sign me up, damnit!

Re:already hard at work eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know of anyone who's purchased Vista.

Oone co-worker who recently bought a subcompact says he's getting a copy of Vista in the mail as part of the deal, but he doesn't know if he wants to install it.

So no. I have no idea of the number of activations.

Wow, per year cost is amazing!

[jdp816]

Pay $199 for XP and it's on the shelves for almost 6 years. Now you can pay $399 for Vista, and it'll only be out 2.5 years. Does that mean that Vienna will cost $799 and only be out for 18 months before the next version comes out? ;)

The marketing is almost ready

[houghi]

Not sure about the technical stuff, yet marketing is already almost finished with it. The result can be seen on this page

Working in retail

[GregPK]

From working in the retail industry... I can see that Vista optimism really isn't all that high... I think its primarily due to the Microsoft choice this time around not to give copies to the Retail Sales people or even thier own field reps... Its that kind of Seed planting that in the past really drew excitement about thier new products like Office and Windows... Speaking to myself I never sold windows and office till I got a free copy from Microsoft to try out for myself and see what it was made of and then I sold like 6 or 8 copies of each for just my 1 freebie... This also caused me to go build my own machine to handle said software helping the hardware vendors we've come to love over the years... The sad part is... Even though I'm not totally sold on Vista.. I am completly sold on the new office and I'm a Veteran user. But among retail its not really selling that much... As an investor and a retail industry person... I'm kinda miffed about the results. A product that for all intensive purposes should sell very well... Isn't... I'm not sure if its a marketing thing, slow upgrade cycle or consumers just waiting about 6 months like I am. Thinking to make the upgrade after they work out the bugs....

Now even their vapour is late

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't know what it is

Normally, at this stage in the cycle its "yeah I know our new thing is a little dissappointing but we're working on stuff in the labs, you're gonna love it, it'll cure cancer"

WTF does he mean "I don't know what it is"? That's no way to run a monopoly. Why isn't he out there crushing demand for alternative products? Why isn't he buying up every promising tech idea around so they can sideline it? Why didn't he use the word "cool"?

Where the hell is Bill Gates when you need him?

Serious people demand serious answers.

features: WinFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it have WinFS?

Re:features: WinFS?

[phillymjs]

Sure! At this stage of development (the "promise the sun, moon and stars" phase), every version of Windows since NT or so has had WinFS!

~Philly

Imagine what Apple could do

[Cannelloni]

Just imagine what the Apple could do if it had Microsoft's resources at its disposal! The Mac OS X is being developed and maintained by a small number of people, and yet is way ahead of Windows in many ways. Usually, the size of the development team doesn't matter much. What matters is the focus and organisation of the group, and of course the technological fondation, in Apple's case FreeBSD, in Microsoft's case some screwed-up version of OS/2 and DEC code.

The current leadership at Microsoft seems stuck in the 1980s, and are unable to understand the emerging reality and the technological possibilities for the future. Steve Ballmer is more of an annoyance than an effective executive. When he opens his big mouth, strange sounds and expressions emerge, or to quote the man himself: "squirt"! That's why I believe it wuld be a very sensible move for Microsoft to get rid of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, if it is at all possible. Such a move could breathe new life into the aging monstrosity of a drone we call Microsoft.

Re:Imagine what Apple could do

[smash]

There's a term in software development called the tarpit.

Basically the idea is that adding more developers will not speed development of a project that is stuck in the doldrums - they'll simply be absorbed into the "tarpit" along with the rest of them and get bogged down in details.

I think one of the reasons apple is doing so well with OS/X is BECAUSE they do not have the same size team working on it.

Re:Imagine what Apple could do

[gig]

One thing I've heard about OS X development is that they are encouraged not to invent stuff that's already been invented, to use the open source implementation for example, and then add value by making it "easy to use" and "just work". They also have a lot of geniuses over there who wouldn't want to work anywhere else and I don't know if that can be said about Microsoft based on their product quality.

Equation

[Andrei D]

Perhaps it will be something like:
Vienna0 = Longhorn0-Vista_final
Vienna_intermediate = Vienna0 - WinFS
and, in the end:
Vienna_final = Vienna_intermediate - the Mono shell.
OMG, Vienna_final is void!

HyperVisors, LOL

[Nanite]

Hypervisors and UI paradigms. That's right ben, keep grasping for that straw of 'innovation'.

[ot] manglement tips

[wild_berry]

While I'm not a management expert, I agree with you: have waves of teams moving from Dev to Maintenance status as each project and product progress. That puts incentive to make software you're proud of, documented for the next phase of development and with the original experts able to make sure that it works and is fixed when foun to be broken.

But... I'm in a pessimistic mood and will point out the throw-away attitude pervading capitalistic western culture, which means that bugs are a motivator for people to pay money for an upgrade to the next edition.

Re:[ot] manglement tips

[Tim C]

That puts incentive to make software you're proud of, documented for the next phase of development

I completely disagree. Someone who knows that he's going to be the one maintaining software until its EOLed has *no* incentive to write documentation - he doesn't need it, he already knows it all. (Yes I know that's a fallacy, but it'll be a very common attitude) Also, I personally make more effort to make software I can be proud of when I know that other people are likely to be exposed to it. The stuff I do at work, that other people on the team are going to be touching, and that the support department will eventually be supporting, is of a much higher quality than most of the crap I churn out at home to scratch an itch.

Also, the last thing you want to do is take your best and brightest developers and shove them into support. If they're any good and have any ambition, they'll stick it out for a little while before becoming bored and leaving, taking their knowledge and talent with them. Maintenance programming and development are different jobs, requiring different skills and different attitudes. You can't turn a developer into a maintenance programmer (or vice versa) by decree, they have to want to make the switch and have the right aptitude.

Re:[ot] manglement tips

[wild_berry]

Fair point about the lazy factor in not documenting something only you or your team will use. Is there no way that an employer can make documentation and maintenance a contractual obligation so that, even if someone's moved to developing a newer product, they have to go back to the old -- and so make it important not to need to go backwards?

Or, again, my niavete is shown in that noone actually wants to maintain their work: not even Linus keeps on top of fixing up 2.2.26, 2.4.34, 2.6.16 as he works on the latest edition.

Along with

[Tony]

I've just added it to my petition to shoot anyone who uses "impact" when they mean "use." People who use "utilize" would be be mandatorily sterilized.

Re:Along with

[chromatic]

People who use "utilize" would be be mandatorily sterilized.

Finally, a presidential candidate I can support!

Re:Along with

[chaud lapin]

And while we are at it, a curse on whoever uses the verb "grow" used transitively, as in "to grow a business". yuck.

Re:Along with

[Phleg]

People who use "utilize" would be be mandatorily sterilized.

I don't know. I tend to use utilize in the context of a "quantity" of usage. For example, "It's a mistake to under-utilize the English language by intentionally avoiding some words."

2 = 7

[gelfling]

Based on the amount of time it took to get this big yawn out the door, 2 translates to 7. Ok maybe they'll strip out 75% of the 'new features' and crunch mode it out the door in 5. Honestly MS has to make their money back on Vista first. It will take one year for them to force it on PC vendors to preload it 100% on every machine. Then it will take another 2 years minimum to make their money back. so in year 3 is where they start to dream up new functions. Years 4 and 5 is where they get work figuring out which of their new functions they can build. Release of new supercool ultra funky codenamed OS at the end of year 5. Immediately followed by an announcement that yet another OS will be released in 2 more years. Years 6 and 7 spent shoehorning 70% of the functions already abandoned.

Redmond has mastered the art of profitably over promising and under delivering. It's incredible and there should be a Harvard B-school case on it.

DOA VIsta

[Anonymous Coward]

It Sounds like MS is admitting that Vista is DOA, nothing less nothing more.

Could you guys refrain...

[pruneau]

Could you guys refrain from publishing BAD Microshaft PR for god's sake ???
Who cares that they are going to have and publish a fscking SP1 to vista because they do not know how to developp an OS anymore ?
Whot want Vista for once ?
That's enough that we have to look a the fskcing Microshaft adverts on /. for crying out loud, leave the Msoft PR to Msoft.

Re:Could you guys refrain...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Billy G is crying in his sleep now he's seen how functionally literate his opposition is.

errr right

[smash]

"We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

In other words, "we have no fucking idea or direction, but we need another cash cow"...

Think of little canned wienies.

[Erris]

I am not too impressed by the name of "Vienna", especially since I happen to like the place.

Don't be so cosmo and it's a great name.

Most Americans will think of "Vienna Sausages" that also have nothing to do with Vienna. These are little canned wienies often forced on Boy Scouts as a food substitute. They are packed in meat jelly that smells horrible and contaminates everything. One of the primary makers of Vienna Sausages is Hormel, the Spam maker. Fewer names could be more appropriate.

Next version?

[PhxBlue]

Hey, maybe they could actually deliver on WinFS this time. Ya think?

Re:Next version?

[Tanuki64]

Hey, maybe they could actually deliver on WinFS this time. Ya think?

Nope, they cannot do that. First there has to be a working example either from apple or the open source community. Else they don't know how to invent it.

Windows Buchenwald

[swb]

You go in, but you probably can't get out.

Gee, what a coincidental timeframe

[kid zeus]

Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Huh, by a couple of months do you think it means the day after OS X 10.5 is released? I'm also guessing MS'll announce come of their prospective 'features' at that point too.

It's amazing just how bitter and defensive MS has become this last year in regards to OS X.

Re:Gee, what a coincidental timeframe

[gig]

> It's amazing just how bitter and defensive MS has become this last year in regards to OS X.

In that weird Newsweek interview, Bill Gates not only mentions Steve Jobs by name, he says "oh, sure, Steve Jobs invented the world!" in a sarcastic way and this is while doing PR for perhaps the latest and most "me-too" version of Windows ever and that is saying something.

I heard that iPods are banned on Microsoft property. That might explain why Vista can't run iTunes and why Microsoft sells so many Zunes to itself.

Re:Gee, what a coincidental timeframe

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that iPods are banned on Microsoft property. That might explain why Vista can't run iTunes and why Microsoft sells so many Zunes to itself.

Then come to Microsoft some time. I work there and there are plenty of people with iPods. There are even Macs throughout campus, both desktops and laptops. And don't forget that we also have a Mac division... and guess what, they use Macs too.

Think like a pro layout program

[Vandil X]

(for example, the number of clicks it takes to insert a picture into a Word document)

Some people use Word as if it were a page layout program like InDesign and QuarkXPress. With this as a cue, Microsoft could have very easily given Word a picture box tool to slimply select from the toolbar, then allow the user to drag a rectangular box. Finally, a keyboard command like Control+E to raise a small filesystem dialogue window to choose the picture you want to insert, maybe even a "source list" in the left margin of the dialogue window to switch between filesystem and pre-installed Office Clip art.

Re:Think like a pro layout program

[TheRaven64]

ClarisWorks version 1 did this very well. The entire suite was component-based. If you put a table into a document, you got all the features of the spreadsheet. If you put a text box in a document, you got all the features of the word processor. I used to use the drawing tool to prepare short documents that required a lot of formatting, since I could just drag text boxes where I wanted and have all of the text-processing power of the word processor with all the layout power of the drawing tool. Moving to Office 95 felt like an incredible step backwards after this.

Re:Think like a pro layout program

[Allador]

For what it's worth, this is exactly how MS Office works.

When you insert a table into a word document, you get a miniature Excel spreadsheet embedded into your word document, and vice versa. When you insert a picture and double-click on it, you get the picture editor.

You can in fact draw text boxes, tables, pictures, word-art, etc etc into most office documents exactly as you describe, and you get the behavior and power of their parent app when you double-click on them.

Now I can't say whether this was there in Office95 ... as my memory isnt that good, but its definitely been that way for a while. Supporting that exact use-case was one of the primary drivers behind OLE.

Strange noone has mentioned the obvious..

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Apocalypse yet. I just like the sound of it. Though "apocalypse" does have negative connotations. How about Windows II - Judgement Day - could have the nice tag line "Hasta la vista, users!" which might help persuading hesitant users to upgrade. Windows Resurrection sounds great, too. Or Windows Evolution.. - Clearly, I'm watching too many movies..

a new user interface paradigm

[Joe The Dragon]

If this new user interface paradigm brakes a lot of older apps then this new windows may take a VERY long time for people to switch to it.
Also by then most people would start to drop off of XP and it the newer windows do not soon wont run there apps and M$ is thinking about not comeing out with the next vista sp like 2000 and what is going with xp right now then we may see a BIG move to OSX or Linux uses wine or xp in VM to use the older apps.

1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Erris]

That doesn't really apply to Windows, for two reasons [listed 3]:

Those methods around the "Osborn Effect" never applied to anything outside the Windoze world. They don't work there now, if they ever did, and the "Osborn Effect" itself did not even apply to Osborn. Really, what you are looking at is advanced vaporware and sales damage control techniques M$ pioneered in the 90's. Those techniques ran out of steam about seven years ago because it's hard to cheat people more than once. M$ credibility is about as low as it gets.

M$ pre-announces the next generation every time it launches a new version. If sales tank, they rush out another version on schedule. Windoze 98 was the last lockstep upsell they managed. XP was a money maker for them, but it and everything in between shows how much power they have actually lost. ME, W2K and even XP failed to grab market share like 3.1, 95 and 98 did. It took four years for them to get more than half of their users on XP. Both business and home users have indeed put of the upgrade for more than six months. There are still plenty of users on 98 and W2K because ME and XP were not good enough for them. Vista looks to be even worse, and it's easy to predict M$ will treat it like ME.

None of it really matters at this point. Vista is the last M$ OS anyone will seriously consider but it sucks. People are going to jump to other platforms rather than wait for M$ to get it's act together. There they will discover the truth, the competition is so far ahead, M$ is a hopeless loser.

Re:1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Macthorpe]

Hi, Twitter! Good to see you. Farming with this account again, after you managed to get eight Troll mods in a row with your main one, eh? I was very impressed at that, good going! Anyway, to business, we can't sit around here, chatting about 'old times', eh?

These stats seem to show that Windows XP is at 75% usage and thus did, in fact, manage to 'grab marketshare' in a way that any OS manufacturer would intend it to. Apparently for you 'plenty of users' is 9% of the market share, which I will concede to you with as much grace as you have ever shown.

Unfortunately for you though, according to these figures, even Mac usage is increasing more than Linux usage is, which I find to be a great pity, as I'd much rather people were using Linux. Oh well, eh? And this is from one website - others suggest Windows XP has an 85% market share, or even in some cases as much as 90%! Obviously 'not good enough', so I'm wondering how Linux's 3% marketshare ranks on that incredible scale of yours?

MS credibility? Better than ever! Sorry to break it to you.

Finally, Vista doesn't suck. I should know - I'm using it. Have you? Don't answer that, it's one of those rhetorical questions you've heard so much about.

Re:1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Anonymous Coward]

It took four years for them to get more than half of their users on XP.

Right, except that unfortunately for you, anyone who wasn't using XP was still using 2K or 98. Thanks for pointing out that Microsoft has only one real competitor: themselves. Great piece of insight there.

Re:1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070209/tc_afp/usitso ftwareretail

Suck it up, floss boy.

Re:1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Erris]

These stats [w3schools.com] seem to show that Windows XP is at 75% usage and thus did, in fact, manage to 'grab marketshare' in a way that any OS manufacturer would intend it to. Apparently for you 'plenty of users' is 9% of the market share, which I will concede to you with as much grace as you have ever shown.

That still shows a loss of power by M$. By any reasonable standard 75% penetration after six years is excellent. Compared to the much more rapid adoption of the past, it's not. Compared to what they need to claim "defacto standard" it's not good enough either. By M$ standards, XP was a failure. Vista will be worse.

Vista doesn't suck. I should know - I'm using it.

You deserve it.

Re:1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Macthorpe]

Did you miss the part where I showed other statistics showing anywhere between 85% and 95% marketsharefor XP? Of course you didn't, but you ignored them anyway because they don't fit into your cock-eyed world-view. Also ignored all the other points I made about other OSes having little to no market share regardless. Good old Twit, willing to ignore the crux of the point to try to make someone concede one insignificant victory. No dice, bitchtits!

You deserve it.

I'm glad we agree on something, at least.

Re:1995 wants it's business plan back.

[Anonymous Coward]

That still shows a loss of power by

There is no "loss of power", fucktard. All those people are still running a Microsoft OS. Can you digest that fact without drooling too much, please?

Suxky

[IwarkChocobos]

I guess they know Vista is going to suck so they want to make the change quickly.

What is a database?

[tepples]

WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database.

What is the fundamental difference between a file system and a hierarchical database?

Re:What is a database?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a developer who uses a hierarchical database at work every day, I can tell you:
- they have transactions (and sometimes they even work!)
- they're far, far more work to set up
- they're not documented nearly as well
- they claim to have great performance, but it's virtually impossible to find anybody who knows enough about tuning them for this to be a practical advantage

Using (for example) ZFS and Beagle would be 100x better for everything we do, but I work at a big company and finding simple and fast solutions that work is not in our mission statement.

Re:What is a database?

[iwein]

That's a good question. The essence is in the definition of a database. If your definition of a database is the thing were you put your persistent data (i.e. something that people might represent as a cilinder in a UML diagram) then there is no fundamental difference. Otherwise you might say that a database is ACID by definition (not so according to wikipedia) and a filesystem is not.

I'm not about to issue definitions here, but for what it's worth: to me you need an FS to have a database and not the other way around.

Re:What is a database?

[jo42]

A hierarchical database stores the data on a file system.

Some of you nincompoops need to go back to CS-101.

So maybe we can make it on XP ?

[dindi]

I really hope that they complete by 2009, so I can go without leaving XP. I survived on w2k for 3 years after the XP release, and if Vienna is so close, we could make it skipping Vista .... it is just my play/test pc on Wintel anyways :)

Re:So maybe we can make it on XP ?

[gig]

> and if Vienna is so close, we could make it skipping Vista

What is so close about Vienna?

First of all, 2009 is NOT close in computing terms, especially with two very large transitions going on right now:

- single to parallel processing, with multicore systems being the rule
- displays changing from "screen resolution" about 100 dpi today to "print resolution" 200-300 dpi over the next few years

These are huge changes that obliterate fundamental assumptions we've been making for the entire history of computing. You will require new software to take advantage of a 200 dpi display and it is coming soon.

If Vista is not ready for this stuff and other modern computing tasks right now, it isn't going to get any readier by 2009. If you don't like Vista you ought to be honest about your need to get a new platform. Vista is the best of the best of the best Microsoft can do.

Re:So maybe we can make it on XP ?

[dindi]

Oh well.. you might be right ..

but what if I am on a middleware team, and all I care about gaming and video is my 360 and my DVD player.

Enterprise apps will move to high res and system admins will need a dual core magic-machine?

I can do my job on a serial terminal, and I entertain myself on a 399 xbox ....

I use XP to play some games and do some testing ... U think i cannot make without all the bling-bling? My servers already have 12 - 24 processors.
Do I really have to care about Vista and not just skip it ?

I dunno really, I am just trying ot skip 1 update on my home machine, for the rest company pays :)

For goodness sake /. readers!

[Toreo asesino]

Well, I got about a 3rd of the way down the comments list, and couldnt read any more. Comments like "Vienna will be out when the next Mac OS is out so they can copy the features! Lol!!1one!" and so on, are so blatently showing your shameless bias towards everything !microsoft, its just unreal! Theres too many times I find some /. comments sickeningly short-sighted, and this post is proving to be a classic example.

Lets have a real discussion then; I want to know how Vienna will:
* Give me a reason to upgrade from Vista, bearing in mind Vista is supposedly the precipse of computing nirvana
* Set it apart from what a modern Linux distro like Ubuntu might look like in 2009 (bearing in mind the frightening speed of improvements the Linux scene has seen in the last 5 years or so)
* What bits of Vista have Microsoft fucked up and will re-do from scratch?

hypervision

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine_monit or

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/Change Log-2.6.20

absolutely astonishing

[stinky wizzleteats]

Why in the world would you talk up your next product just weeks after the launch of your current one? What kind of confidence must such a statement betray about the expected market acceptance of Vista? You're telling me to entrust my computer, my data, and my business on Vista, but you prefer to stake your company's image and reputation on vaporware instead?

Shocking.

More Broken-ware?

[CrossChris]

The next iteration of Windows will just be more of the same old rubbish: broken code heaped upon
stolen code. It will still have the underlying junk with more pretty effects bolted on.

Nifty Doorways!

[BlastQuake]

http://www.ubersoft.net/

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one a little afraid of the word "consumer" used instead of the usual term "user"?

Graphical Consumer Interface?

timescales and burners

[Syberghost]

Well, they should be able to make that target, since they've clearly put security on the back burner with Vista.

FLAMEBAIT! Come on mods... do something useful

[popo]

Christ people, if the parent statement had been inverted to be the slightest diss
on Apple there would have been an uproar.

Can we get over the "Microsoft just steals ideas" sentiment and realize that Windows is
a damn good OS. Maybe its not your favorite but believe it or not (and I know, on Slashdot
this is probably hard to believe) it actually is the *majority* of people's favorite OS,
and that's not because they haven't been "exposed" to OSX. Its because of a whole bunch
of upstream issues like work flow, hardware options, ease of software development, etc.

Now the real irony is -- I'll probably get modded down as flamebait.

Sigh. Fanboys should never be given mod points.

Re:vaporware and the Vista "Wow!"

[BeerCat]

this is 100% vaporware

when it ships in 20012...

Eighteen thousand and five in years in development. Wow!

fundamental piece of...

[Anonymous Coward]

"a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers"

Yeah, it sounds like a really fundamental, costumer need-driven stuff... The whole world it just waiting in excitement.

Ultravox premonition?

[cliveholloway]

"This means nothing to me, Ohhhhhh Vienna"

apt :)

MS names starting with "V" and ending in "A"

[pandrijeczko]

Vista...

Vienna...

Presumably "Windows Vagina" is due for release some time around 2011 then...

Official Product Name

[MemoryDragon]

Windows Gulag...

Release Date

[Drakin020]

and we may see it as early as 2009

Which really means 2012

Maybe because Wall St. always looks forward?

[walterbyrd]

Every company wants the public to believe the same thing: "in the near future profits will be awsome!" Anticipation is always greater than reality. This is why you buy on the rumor, and sell on the news.

Msft's stock price went way up in anticipation of Vista. Now that Vista is out, the stock price is on the way back down. What good are msft exec stock options, if msft can't spin up some hype, and drive the share price up?

When was the last time that a msft product was delivered on time, or lived up to it's pre-release hype? Does anybody familiar with msft actually believe that some awsome new msft OS will be out in two years?

But, I would not be surprised to see msft stock to spike a little early next week. Might be a good time for execs to exercise their options.

Ok, it's official! Vista = Windows ME R2

[PotatoHead]

Glad we are getting that out of the way quick! Acceptance is the first step on the path to healing.

Hypervisors!

[SiliconEntity]

Hypervisors are the way to go for the OS of the future. Microsoft has had this vision for years. It was the foundation of their Next Generation Secure Computing Base, NGSCB, aka (ominous music here) Palladium.

Palladium got embroiled in the whole DRM controversy but there are good reasons to go this way independent of DRM. The idea is that you have a regular OS running, a Vista type OS, and then you launch your hypervisor. The hypervisor digs its way under the OS, takes control, and the OS is then packaged up and is running in a virtual machine. This is what they call "Late Launch" and is the key to one aspect of the technology I will explain below.

Now, here is the big win. You can create a new class of software, "applets" (maybe "virtlets" would be a better name) which interface directly to the hypervisor instead of the big legacy OS. These run in separate VMs so are immune to corruption of the big OS. They are simple and use a minimal API from the hypervisor so the chances of getting the code right and bug free are much greater. You can now use these for security oriented features you'd never dare to dream of on a monolithic OS. Think of Internet voting as a good example of what kind of security we are talking about. A more prosaic example is ecommerce - in a future world where people get their credit card numbers stolen all the time by malware there will be a real need for a secure way to shop online. Hypervisors and virtlets give developers a chance to start with a clean sheet of paper on the security front, while still maintaining full legacy backwards compatibility.

Then there's the kicker. Part of the goal of Late Launch is to use the TPM chip to measure (hash) the hypervisor and each VM separately. It means that each VM has an identity that it can securely attest to using a certified key embedded in the TPM chip. That Internet voting app? It can connect to the voting server and the server can verify that it is running in a clean state. Any corruption would be detected and show up in a bad hash report from the TPM chip. Malware can't fake that report because nobody can fake it, not even the user (meaning, he can't be fooled into faking it either - this is the flaw in EFF's "owner override" proposal, but that's another story).

This is all happening, folks. Intel's Lagrande Technology, now called TXT or Trusted Execution Technology, is rolling out as we write. This was the gating factor for all this technology and is probably the real reason it didn't appear in Vista - the hardware wasn't ready. But it's going to be there and it will be ubiquitous in a couple of years (at least, as ubiquitous as Vista-ready PCs are today). The next OS will take advantage of these features (and analogous ones on AMD, code-named Presidio) and will provide a whole new paradigm for security. This will leap beyond anything Apple can do and they will be playing catch-up, unless of course they start heading in this direction themselves.

To me as a security person, this is the obvious, inevitable path of OS development and is the only plausible thing Microsoft could be talking about. It should be very exciting to see these ideas brought to market in real systems.

Re:Hypervisors!

[gig]

You are smoking the same stuff as Redmond and it is not the good stuff we get down here in Northern California.

Nobody wants to buy all that shit you just described. There are very few people who even like the dream.

The only reason people like virtualization in the context of Windows is to take that pig of a software project and wrap it up in a cheap virtual PC that can contain it in the first place, so you can run it as a single application on a better operating system, to test Web sites in Explorer or whatever. When my Windows-in-a-box crashes and won't boot, I just throw out the disk image file and get a fresh one from storage and I'm back in business. When Windows crashes my iTunes doesn't even hiccup because it is not running in there.

I call Prediction

[Ender77]

I predict that the new OS will have the CUBE feature of Beryl and the panel of apple. Microsoft doesn't invent new technology, they steal it. I also predict the new gaming system after 360 will have controller similar to the Nintendo WII.

Re:I call Prediction

[SoonerPet]

The Cube effect is actually from 10.3 Panther, it was used for quick user switching, and since then has been used in other areas. All way before Beryl.

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[rwven]

Look at history here. '95 - 1995, '98 - 1998, ME - 2000, XP - 2001, Vista - 2007. It looks to me like Vista was just a massive fluke. Their releases had been getting closer and closer together up until Vista...although many would argue that ME wasn't worth being released in the first place.

I'd honestly be VERY surprised if MS didn't release the next version a LOT faster than they released Vista. I don't know if I'd bet on 2009, but I'd bet on 2010 "or sooner."

In late 2004 they basically scrapped longhorn and started over. In essence they built all of vista between late 2004 and early 2007. There's no reason they can't design the next step in another 2 or 3 years.

For the Sake of the world...

[JimXugle]

Microsoft, Scrap Win32 and the NT Kernel. Build a new OS from the ground up. Make it a variant of Unix. Get it certified by The Open Group. Write the Kernel in C so it's stable. Make the OS modular so that the entire system won't go down when something crashes. Use a standardized filesystem like ext3. Run a compatibility layer as a non-privileged user for legacy support. Add a Sudoku game.

My interpretation:

[faedle]

"Hey, wait a minute. Apple puts out a point release of Mac OS X every 18 months, and gets a lot of hype. We wait six years to put out a significant upgrade to our OS, and the general public's response is underwhelming. Maybe more frequent releases will work!"

What they don't seem to forget is that Mac OS X keeps improving the base user experience. Since Windows 2000, we've had three significantly different Windows OS user experiences. The little I've already worked with Vista, it was a big pain in the ass to figure out how to mount a Samba file share. I kept expecting to just do a \\server\share in Explorer or something, that didn't work.

Meanwhile, META-K on Finder has worked to pull up the Connect to Server.. dialog ever since at least 10.2. Now, whether or not SMB support was working or not was debatable, but at least the UI never changed dramatically.

Re:I'm sorry but our intelligence says otherwise..

[gd23ka]

Shhhh... you're stirring up the profanes.

It'll be as good as Windows 0.90!

[Monsterdog]

A fundamental piece of enabling technology? Does that mean they're going to eliminate all of the DRM so that the OS actually stands a chance of working in a half-arsed manner?

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot Windows 2000 in late 1999. Which was certainly more useful than ME...

Re:FLAMEBAIT! Come on mods... do something useful

[oyenstikker]

"Windows is a damn good OS."

Do you _use_ Windows? I wasted 2 hours a few days ago finding out that I have to rewrite a bunch of scripts because Windows has an insanely short maximum command line argument length, and if you hit it it chops off your arguments and sticks a "D" at the end. Several times a I have coworkers come to me to have me run batch jobs on my Linux box because it will take me 2 minutes to do something that Windows make incredibly difficult. When they ask me to adapt my scripts to Cygwin/bash, it always takes me longer to deal with the stupidities of Windows than it took me to write the script in the first place.

Windows is a mediocre appliance. It is a terrible operating system.

If he doesn't know

[rbanffy]

"Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is "

If he doesn't know, how they expect to deliver something in 2.5 years?

How many of the 4 pillars made it into Vista?

[NeMon'ess]

Before MS started cutting back at Longhorn, they talked about the four pillars that would support the OS. Aero Glass was one of them. Redoing the file system was another, but it got cut. Did MS get a second pillar into Vista? What were the others, and might they make it into Vienna?

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[another_fanboy]

There's no reason they can't design the next step in another 2 or 3 years.
There are many projects they had planned for Vista that were never completed ( WinFS for example ). Assuming they are near completion, some of them would designate an "overhaul" of the core of Windows. Rather than trying to force them into a semi-stable environment as a service pack, MS may as well use them in the next version.

Hell Hath No Fury...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Like an MCSE feeling scorned for blowing his trustfund on worthless MS cert. :-D

The official codename leaked: it's BongHorn

[schwaang]

Because of all the pipe dreams, no doubt.

You mean like OJFS?

[tepples]

As a developer who uses a hierarchical database at work every day, I can tell you:
- they have transactions (and sometimes they even work!) Unlike Reiser4?

I work at a big company and finding simple and fast solutions that work is not in our mission statement. It is if "provide value to the shareholder" is an element.

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks to me like the parent was outlining just the consumer versions, which 2000 was not. Note Media Center Edition is also missing and could be placed in 2005 but this may be properly grouped with XP.

For the professional versions: NT 3.5 - 1994, NT 4.0 - 1996, 2000 - 2000, XP - 2001, 2003 - 2003, 2003 R2 - 2005, Vista - 2007

This is a really....

[robinjo]

...good example of astroturfing

Re:This is a really....

[badonkey]

I'm in college, and I like the product. Just because you disagree doesn't change my intentions. Nice try.

Re:This is a really....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell is it that everybody that disagrees with mainstream slashdot thinking has to be an astroturfer?

Good god, it's like the word exists solely to justify confirmation bias.

Re:This is a really....

[Tim C]

Disclaimer: I work for a small, independent web company in the UK. I have never knowingly had any contact with anyone working at MS, and I have never received any freebie from any company other than the crap that's handed out to everyone at conferences. I have been to two conferences, JavaUK06 (Sun) and XP Day (a bunch of extreme programming advocates). I am neither a shill nor an astroturfer for MS or any other company (Hell, I wouldn't even shill for my own company, and I have shares in it)

I've briefly played with the Vista betas and RCs, and I like it a lot. I didn't find UAC particularly intrusive, and I'm a sucker for eye candy and have a (year old) machine that's perfectly capable of running Aero with all the bells and whistles. I have other stuff I need to buy now, and I'll probably wait for the first service pack in any case, but I fully intend to buy Vista, probably an OEM copy of the Ultimate edition.

Don't let your prejudices blind you to the fact that some people genuinely like things that you do not. The habit of accusing anyone who claims to like $unpopularThing of being a shill is immature and tiresome.

Re:This is a really....

[IainCartwright]

...good example of putting your fingers in your ears and saying "I can't hear you, I can't hear you"

what happened?

[Grinin]

What happened to Vista being the last Windows OS?? :D

Of course... been in the works for years.

[wirelessbuzzers]

How long was Vista feature-frozen? Years. Probably since before it was even called that. Now, it seems kind of unlikely that the windows design team were working exclusively on Vista for all those years.

They started on this a long time ago, and they certainly want to avoid another multi-year delay.

So why is everyone so surprised that it's slated for 2009? They have almost 3 years to push it out the door. Every other major OS is on a faster release cycle than that.

Altogether, now...

[OriginalArlen]

Vienna?

This means nothing to me.

Kind of like Zune.

[Erris]

A rude little AC points to one of many articles showing a spurt of Vista sales and adds his opinion,

Suck it up, floss boy.

My opinion, it's a blip that will go away. You won't be able to convince people to buy and use software that does not work and Vista does not work.

Re:Kind of like Zune.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but your opinion is very, very wrong.

Don't take it the wrong way, though, it's fine to hold another opinion, even if it is as stupid as that one.

FUD before the last set of CD burners cooled down

[msobkow]

"We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it."

In other words:

We don't know what we're doing. We haven't thought about what we're doing. All we can tell you is we're going to do something, so you better not buy any competitor's products until we figure out what we're doing.

Gotta love the fudbombs, eh?

DNF

[advs89]

The company plans to work with 3D Realms to bundle the OS with Duke Nukem Forever.

What a pathetic load of shit

[theolein]

Man, really. get a grip on yourself. It's just a fucking operating system. Fucking dweeb.

GREAT!

[Biff98]

So for next version of windows, we already know:

1. It will be based on at least 5 year old thinking and technology
2. They will have learned nothing from the design of Vista

Sweeeet

Taking The Wind Out Of Apple's Sails?

[GaryPatterson]

I suspect that Microsoft are announcing shiny new software for some future date is that they're worried about Leopard.

Reviewers are already pitting Vista against OS X 10.4 and finding them neck-and-neck, with Vista coming out ahead on some features and OS X coming out ahead on others.

A lot of people are expecting the upcoming OS X 10.5 to blow Vista's features out of the water. Microsoft don't want Vista to look like a lame (but profitable) duck for a few years, so they're going to pump up the next big thing. To paraphrase their past vapourware strategies - "don't buy from them, stay with us and you'll get all their features anyway, soon, soon..."

"We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release."

Is that just a complete lie, a total re-writing of history? I've never heard anything other than the story of years of painful work going nowhere, resetting to Win2K3, jettisoning features and finally making progress. I've never heard this bit about slacking off for a couple of years, not really trying and then picking things back up later on.

So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna?

According to Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers."

"It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

This comment reveals that Vienna is truly vapourware - they've not even reached the whiteboard to block out the big features.

How can Microsoft let executives like this go out and give an interview with no spiel? A quick elevator speech is all that's required. Just something about "new filesystem database to revolutionise files" or "rich media" or even "exceedingly wealthy media born with a silver spoon." Anything is better than this sort of "well, gee, I dunno, didn't think you'd ask me that, hmm... nope, nothing's come to mind."

Re:Taking The Wind Out Of Apple's Sails?

[gig]

> with Vista coming out ahead on some features and OS X coming out ahead on others.

Which reviewer found which feature of Vista ahead of Tiger? I haven't seen that at all. The new features that Bill Gates touted were parental controls (Tiger, 2005), making DVD movies (Classic, 1999), using a pretty translucent UI (Cheetah, 2001) that is drawn by the 3D hardware (Panther, 2003), and using little mini-apps to check news feeds and weather and such (Tiger, 2005), and a desktop search menu (Tiger, 2005) with instant searches (Classic, 1999). Also in the news, the speech recognition (Classic, 1999) feature of Vista that lacks the password that the Mac's speech recognition has and so has already been demonstrated to enable a Flash movie in a Web page to trash all the user's desktop files and then empty the trash (George Ou, Windows apologist and IT writer discovered this one during the week it took him to fail to upgrade his PC to Vista).

The only thing I've found so far that the Mac doesn't already have is the thing where a USB key can be used as extra swap file cache. But since Macs typically have higher RAM capacity and I never notice the swap file working (even when it is) it is questionable whether we are missing this feature at all.

So what is the Vista feature that Mac users don't have or might want? Where is the argument for Vista? I don't see anybody making that argument very well at all. Even where you see people defending Vista against Tiger it is often with disinformation or ignorance. They didn't even check the Tiger spec sheet to make sure that wasn't in there, or they see it isn't in the Tiger spec sheet so they think it isn't in Mac OS but it turns out that feature was in an earlier revision or even in Classic.

Re:Taking The Wind Out Of Apple's Sails?

[GaryPatterson]

The reviews I've seen with feature comparisons have usually been in print magazines. Just type "Vista Tiger" into Google and you'll see a good number of comparison articles. I wouldn't expect OS X 10.4 to be better than Vista at every single thing, given the relative ages. That it stands up so well is a testament to Apple and is damning for Microsoft's five year Vista odyssey.

I agree that Vista is nothing special for Mac users, and only slightly special for Windows users, but my first point is that Microsoft see Leopard as a threat and are putting out some FUD in readiness.

Great, they know they've got a spud.

[Anonymous Coward]

"5+ years ago, there was a very discernible improvement in performance every two years. Now? Not so much unless you're using things like FPS games which really tax the computer. In fact, I'd probably say that as the years go by, the fraction of apps that people want to use and that really tax the CPU is going down."

Video and audio creation for when people get bored with downloading.

To hypervise, or not to hypervise.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an alternative to hypervisors.

---
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting [the same inane comments they always do]."

Bwahahahahaha!!! Yeah, right!

[Master of Transhuman]

The next Windows OS will out in two years!

Bwahahahahaha!!!

Email me when this happens - in about five years - or ten.

OTOH, after waiting FIVE years for Vista - and the comment about, "Gee, it was late because we had to stop working on it to make XP more secure!" - Oh, please, stop me! Bwahahahahaha!!! - they obviously think Vista is going to be SUCH A DOG that people will be DESPERATE for yet ANOTHER DOG two years later!

Jesus! You can't believe the bullshit this fucking company puts out!

Put this company OUT OF BUSINESS! NOW! PLEASE!

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[Master of Transhuman]

Mod parent up!

Bill Gates has done this EXACT SAME THING since he STARTED Microsoft.

Go read the bios. His standard response to a customer saying "The new stuff is crap!" is: "Wait until the next version! It will be awesome! You'll see!"

(Anybody remember Jake Blues in "The Blues Brothers"?)

Hey Astro

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that last bit of dramatic self-righteousness spontaneous or another MS script to read?

And what does you being in college* have to do with anything?

*BTW, I'm in a wheelchair as I type this.

Re:Hey Astro

[badonkey]

Being in college means I don't work for Microsoft. I have never received any payment, "scripts" to read, or freebies. And yet, I still like the product.

Push it all you like, but I'm a person without allegiances who uses products he enjoys. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm also perfectly fine with others not liking Vista. People can have different preferences without one side being the result of some evil scheme (e.g. astroturfing).

Turning product choices into religious wars is pathetic. Given that you post as AC when doing it, I'd guess you already know that.

Re:Hey Astro

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in college means I don't work

Wow, I am in college and I do work (now for Costco). And I worked for MS in the last two summers (as my campus was in Bellevue).

Sorry I didn't infer you were plain lazy with that college quote.

It's all about the Enderles

[Anonymous Coward]

InfoWorld means it's Rob and Mary Enderle means it's all bullshit propaganda. Move on folks, nothing here to see. And watch out for Dark Reading too: the Enderles have their mitts in everything these days.

Pull the other one, Ben

[FFFish]

"We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is ... Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers. It's too early for me to talk about it ... But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."

Riiiight. You, Microsoft, are going to implement a fundamental new techology and bring it to release successfully in two years. And from a standing start because, as you've just admitted, you haven't even nailed down what it is you are going to do.

Microsoft has not only fumbled the ball, they've accidently knocked it out out of the yard into moving traffic.

it's Windows 7, not Vienna

[Anonymous Coward]

We're no longer calling it Vienna, it's Windows 7 now. Also we have like 0 features agreed because none of the features we really want to do will fit within the schedule. The Sinofsky plan may have worked for Office but it's totally going to fail in the OS. We just can't cut everything we can't do in 2 years because we'll never get to do anything of substance. The sad reality is people will probably shell out for an upgrade to get a "new great way" of managing your pictures and videos and some extra eye candy.

disgruntled

Enabling?

[Trogre]

Isn't the main benefit of Vista not geared at the user but at copyright holders, by providing a system that is built from the ground up with DRM?

I'm tagging this one Disabling.

Re:FLAMEBAIT! Come on mods... do something useful

[Legion303]

Of course it was flamebait. I almost used the word for my subject line, in fact. But as someone who uses Windows daily as a primary OS, I recognize that there is almost no innovation involved in it. That's not much different from other operating systems, really, but it's still a fact.

Also: fucked your mom.

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[gig]

When talking about Microsoft's software development, it really helps to drop the marketing names and use the version numbers.

1995 Windows v4.0 (the first real Windows GUI)
1998 Windows v4.1 (now includes Internet Explorer)
2000 Windows v5.0 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, but not ready for all users yet ... see Windows ME)
2001 Windows v5.1 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, now for all users, no more DOS versions, NT is now as good as DOS in every way)
2007 Windows v6.0 (world's largest and most highly-anticipated security patch, plus immature new GUI with outrageous hardware reqs)

The problem I think they are having is that they don't ever build anything with enough quality that they can iterate on it. They shipped Windows Vista v1.0 instead of shipping a true Windows v6.0 with six generations of steady evolutionary advancement in features and functionality.

yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

900 million PCs in the planet, and there's Microsoft software in 96% of them. wake me up when you realize how painfully stupid you are, and then we'll talk about how people "buy and use software". thanks.

When but not What

[the_womble]

If they do not know what the key technology they want to put into it is then:

they know when they want to do it, but not what they want to do.

So all they do is pick something that can easily be done in two years.

I bet a lot of people wish they were also in a position to adjust the spec to the timetable.

Re:Fundamentals from OS X.

[Been on TV]

The real translation for "...But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more." is:

We really don't have a clue what to add yet, but as soon as Mac OS X 10.5 is out we will get you the list.

Re:Fundamentals from OS X.

[gig]

If Leopard has a hypervisor or a new user experience for consumers then Bill Gates is going to be hopping mad that Apple copied him again.

They wanna make somethin totally new in 2.5 years?

[master_p]

...and they have no clue what that is yet???

I've read so many jokes about Microsoft today (clippy etc)...please no more! my belly is hurting from the laughter...

Windows Schrödinger

[francium de neobie]

Before the release date, a killer feature is clearly understood and completely unknown to a VP of Microsoft at the same time.

The Real Message

[wintermute1974]

The real message from Microsoft is this: "Vista sucks, but don't worry, we're already working on something better. Buy Vista now and anticipate the wonder that will be Vienna later."

what's it called?

[DragonTHC]

Is it called "Barred Windows".

The Apple commercial with the scary agent guy has it correct.
Microsoft's approach to security is confusing at best.

After working with windows as an admin for 10 years, I recently heard from a programmer that there are 2 levels above administrator in vista.
this down from 3 levels above in XP. This is why the security issues exist.
You don't control the access to your own OS. Instead, there are levels there for government intrusion, and levels for microsoft intrusion.

In Linux, there are still access methods for government, but there are none higher than root.

Re:already hard at work eh?

[gig]

Your different teams argument only makes me think that there ought to be a special Windows team that DESIGNS each new version of Windows, and they would have finished their design work on XP sometime during 1999 and then as the coders take the ball and move it along eventually to marketing, then the design team would pass the new ball to the coders so they can work on the next version.

In other words, if there is a new Windows coming in 2009 then it should already have been designed by now. The spec should already be final, and a bunch of highly paid world-class designers at Microsoft ought to be taking each other out for martinis right now celebrating how good the Vienna spec turned out.

Or are they skipping the design step again? Hasn't hurt them in the past, right?

It's cumbersome, ancient - & working.

[FallOfDay]

I absolutely, desperately need iTunes & an iPhone because...? ;)

Me? I'm running...
DX9 (XP Home) for games & media creation - on a 5yo motherboard (Jetway V400, if I remember correctly) & HD. This board's had three graphics cards in it's lifetime, so far, & I expect to have a 7600GT AGP on XP drivers for it before the upgrades finish. Fortunately, nVidia for XP is still good to go.
XP Pro for a server, again, a low-spec motherboard.
MacOS 8.5 on a G3 Beige for the Mac-only software, which I use. (When was this made?!)
Kubuntu for *NIX/KDE testing - again on 2002-spec hardware.

What's not important is how new it is, or, necessarily, the price; just that it works for what you want it to do. One combination of boxes isn't necessarily right for everyone. As DoofusOfDeath pointed out, it may be ancient, but it ain't broke through lack of support or DX10/64bit-only software yet, so why 'fix' it?

As you (gig) point out, validly, the naive continue to want to go to the computing equivalent of the front line in a war zone. The rest of us will sit back & wait until it's absolutely necessary!

i.e. Show me the software, which I'd use, which won't run on one of my systems. Where's the OGL, DX9 & 32-bit murdering app which demands the upgrade?

Why not develop an all-new OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Microsoft still beating this (mostly) dead horse? I would like to see them release a completely new OS with no backwards compatibility to the existing Windows systems. This would give them the opportunity to re-engineer a lot of the crap that Windows seems to be dragging with it from version to version.

What a pack of losers.

[twitter]

Hi, Twitter! Good to see you. Farming with this account again, after you managed to get eight Troll mods in a row with your main one, eh? I was very impressed at that, good going! Anyway, to business, we can't sit around here, chatting about 'old times', eh?

Hello to you too. Don't have enough mod points to nuke more than one account at a time? Awwwww, so sad. Things might not go the way your corporate masters want. It's funny how a few people with a little time on their hands can show up billions of dollars worth of marketing bullshit.

Keep it up Erris and don't listen to these turds.

Re:What a pack of losers.

[Macthorpe]

Yawn - I still don't work for Microsoft. Wiping my arse with your arguments is my hobby, remember?

Oh, and I don't waste my mod points on you. Sorry to rain on your pretentious parade, but I only mod up and only people who deserve it, which has never been you.

Keep trying though - I especially loved the 'pretending you're not Erris' thing, that was pretty good.

Re:What a pack of losers.

[Keith Russell]

Hey, you're getting better at keeping your sock puppets straight!

Should we add multiple personality disorder to the list of performance art "mental illnesses" you've exhibited in the name of... whoever?

Re:What a pack of losers.

[twitter]

Troll.

Re:What a pack of losers.

[Keith Russell]

Oooh, "troll". I'm crushed.

Just how stupid do you think anybody who follows that link is? Are you playing for your legions of "I hate anyone who doesn't make a show of hating Microsoft" comrades when you post that? Or was that just to give you something to read when your sock puppet "personality" is dominant?

Re:already hard at work eh?

[omicronish]

In other words, if there is a new Windows coming in 2009 then it should already have been designed by now. The spec should already be final, and a bunch of highly paid world-class designers at Microsoft ought to be taking each other out for martinis right now celebrating how good the Vienna spec turned out.

Or are they skipping the design step again? Hasn't hurt them in the past, right?

You're implying that they either have a separate design team, or they're skipping design. How about another possibility: the same team also does design work. Specs can range from high level to the coding level, and especially in the latter it does not make sense to exclude devs, the one who will be implementing the detailed spec, from the design process.

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[Allador]

Your timeline is way off.

You're randomly mixing the Win9x line with the NT line. Plus you've completely skipped 5.2 (ie, Windows 2003 Server). From concise windows timeline, it looks more like this:

• 1985 - DOS based - Windows 1.0
• 1987 - DOS based - Windows 2.0
• 1990 - DOS based - Windows 3.0
• 1992 - DOS based - Windows For Workgroups 3.1
• 1993 - NT Kernel - NT 3.1
• 1994 - NT Kernel - NT 3.5
• 1995 - NT Kernel - NT 3.51
• 1995 - Win9x Core - Windows 95
• 1996 - NT Kernel - NT 4.0
• 1998 - Win9x Core - Windows 98
• 1999 - Win9x Core - Windows 98 SE
• 2000 - Win9x Core - Windows ME (last of the 9x based systems)
• 2000 - NT Kernel - NT 5.0 (ie, Windows 2000)
• 2001 - NT Kernel - NT 5.1 (ie, Windows XP)
• 2003 - NT Kernel - NT 5.2 (ie, Windows 2003 server)
• 2004 - NT Kernel - NT 5.1R2 (ie, Windows XP SP2)
• 2005 - NT Kernel - NT 5.2R2 (ie, Windows 2003 Server R2)
• 2007 - NT Kernel - NT 6.0 (ie, Windows Vista)

Re:haha, tag this Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, whate

[Allador]

Grrr, hit the submit button too early. To continue:

NT5 was not the first bottom-up re-write on NT ... it was a release after 7 years of evolution from the NT team. And it wasnt based on ME, it was Windows 2000.

ME was the last dying gasp of the consumer-focused Win9x line.

Also note that the first public release of NT as v3.1 was a marketing choice to appear like it was evolving in line with the 'Windows' line, but there was no connection whatsoever at that point. It was basically a couple years of work from the VMS team that MS poached to create NT.

Vista is the culmination of ~10 years of evolution of the NT line, combined with some technologies brought in from the 9x line in the NT5/win2000 days. The VMS-like base that NT started with was solid, but has arguably been polluted by various strategic choices MS has made (marketing, consumer focus, backwards compatibility, GUI focus, etc).

Star Trek

[Askmum]

Hypervisor. Isn't that the thing that Geordi uses to see?

Yeah, we'll all benefit from that.

Re:FLAMEBAIT! Come on mods... do something useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my god, you got modded as flamebait.

Slashdot can be so pathetic...